Nintendo today announced that over 1,000 Sega Genesis and (Hudson/NEC) TurboGrafx games will be available for download to play on the Revolution’s Virtual Console. This rounds out the offering to date—a pantheon of legacy systems including games from the NES, SNES and N64 systems.

Perhaps even more exciting was the announcement that game developers can choose to distribute their games expressly through the Virtual Console, (as opposed to relying on an expensive hardcopy distribution model), opening the floodgates to smaller, independent developers and increasing the potential gamespace by an order of magnitude at the very least.

The new forms of innovative software that can be created by any size developer will be made available for download via Revolution’s Virtual Console service.

Nintendo has held for some time that their goal is not to compete directly with the graphics or pure processing power of the Xbox 360 or the PS3, but rather to target an entirely new demographic, currently untapped—mainstream everyone—those intimidated or otherwise turned off to video games. Too much of the non-game-playing public finds themselves longing for the days of Space Invaders and Pac-Man, intimidated by the extreme graphics and complex gameplay found in the current generation’s offerings. A console that can play tens of thousands of simple classics and (hopefully) hundreds of new, creative offerings using a completely different, wholly intuitive controller could very well do some amazing things to the market as a whole.

My only hope is that we’ll see some of the great third-party SNES classics released for the Revolution. Chrono Trigger and Earthbound would suit my fancy just fine. (That, and that they don’t rename the Revolution something completely ridiculous. I’m looking in your direction, “Nintendo Go.”)

We’ll be live at E3 in May, bringing you our hands-on coverage of the Revolution, so stay tuned.

Press Release | PR Newswire