Wii, Austin-style

While this could go the way of elitist hobnobbing, it also has some great potential.

Details are emerging of Nintendo doing their own viral marketing just before the release of the Wii console. They will be having private parties in select major cities. In fact, Austin is one of the only four cities rumored. The others are LA, Chicago, and Denver. Nintendo chooses several people as hosts and those luckies invite 30 of their closest friends. Little is known about the content of the parties beyond messing with the new console and guests being whisked there in secret. The parties will start in mid-October.

The quality of the parties will be in the hosts. Who are how they are picking them is anyone’s guess at this point. Will they pick local celebs, hardcore Nintendo geeks, General gamer types, or regular people wandering down SoCo? I doubt it will be entirely random.

Seems that they are trying to make it sorta trendy, so I would bet they are going for the 4th-6th street crowd or possibly even focus on University of Texas students.

A bit ago I reported that Nintendo was going to be promoting the Nintendo Wii grassroots style by using a series of private sessions with regular gamers and non-gamers across the country.

Nintendo is going to use some mysterious formula to calculate buzz and cool and then select a few people as “hosts” for this private Wii parties. The plan, it sounds like, is for Nintendo to select a few of these hosts for each city.

Then the host gets to invite a couple dozen friends, family and the like. The hope, I hear, is that it won’t be just a Wii and 30 Nintendo fanboys. What Nintendo really wants is a nice mix of soccer moms, dads, grandmas, worker bees, technophiles and, yes, some hardcore gamers.

The event will feature a number of Wii games, but the only two I’ve been able to nail down are Wii Sports and WarioWare: Smooth Moves.

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