Nintendo Hits a Home Run with Mario Super Sluggers

REDMOND, Wash.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--The ongoing excitement over Nintendo’s groundbreaking Wii^™ system gets a surprise springtime boost with the announcement of a new game. Kicking off its semiannual media summit in San Francisco near the company’s new sales and marketing offices in Redwood City, Calif., Nintendo of America today revealed plans for Mario Super Sluggers^™ for Wii, giving baseball fans even more reason to root this season.

“Mario is truly a one-of-a-kind character; clearly fans can’t get enough of him and his friends,” said Cammie Dunaway, Nintendo of America’s executive vice president of Sales & Marketing. “We’re giving Wii users brilliant new ways to enjoy him while expanding our series of active-play games.”

In the same spirit as other sports-themed Mario^™ games on Wii like Mario Strikers^® Charged and Mario Kart^® Wii, Mario Super Sluggers blends richly interactive baseball action with eccentric characters and elements from across the popular Mario universe. Players can swing the wireless Wii Remote^™ just like a real bat or wave it toward the plate to deliver a masterful pitch, enjoying the same intuitive, easy-to-learn controls that helped make Wii Sports^™ a living room hit. With Mario and his unpredictable pals filling out the roster, imagination and active-play innovation are sure to dominate the diamond in this lively title, scheduled for release later this year.

Remember that Wii features parental controls that let adults manage the content their children can access. For more information about this and other Wii features, visit Wii.com.

About Nintendo

The worldwide innovator in the creation of interactive entertainment, Nintendo Co., Ltd., of Kyoto, Japan, manufactures and markets hardware and software for its Wii^™, Nintendo DS^™, Game Boy^® Advance and Nintendo GameCube^™ systems. Since 1983, Nintendo has sold nearly 2.5 billion video games and more than 430 million hardware units globally, and has created industry icons like Mario^™, Donkey Kong^®, Metroid^®, Zelda^™ and Pokémon^®. A wholly owned subsidiary, Nintendo of America Inc., based in Redmond, Wash., serves as headquarters for Nintendo’s operations in the Western Hemisphere. For more information about Nintendo, visit the company’s Web site at www.nintendo.com.

©2008 Nintendo. ©2008 NAMCO BANDAI Games Inc.

Note to editors: Nintendo press materials are available at press.nintendo.com, a password-protected site. To obtain a login, please contact Danny Beardsworth at 213-438-8835 or dbeardsworth@golinharris.com. Users can receive instant Nintendo information by subscribing to the site’s RSS feed. B-roll is available at www.thenewsmarket.com/Nintendo.