What is going on here at GDC?

Why do I keep stumbling across signs that American and European developers are finally — finally — getting on board (or being brought on board) the DS and Wii development bandwagon?

And they’re doing it by making games I’d actually like to play.

Was it not just this summer that I was haranguing Nintendo of America president Reggie Fils-Aime about the imbalance between the many Nintendo-supported Japanese-made Wii and DS games to the apparently scant support from Nintendo for DS and Wii games made by Americans and Europeans?

Was I really supposed to believe him that things were going to change?

Four signs at GDC already this week that Reggie was on to something…

1. Nintendo’s new WiiWare download service, launching May 12, will feature “a new episodic game series from Telltale,” the American studio behind the “Sam & Max” episodic series, according to a Nintendo press release sent this morning.
2. WiiWare will also feature “LostWinds,” a promising wind-blown platformer from European house Frontier. We published impressions and an interview about the game earlier today.
3. My favorite game of the Independent Games Festival (and, bear in mind, I’m a judge for it) is a physics-based construction-set/platformer called “World of Goo.” It’s made by a two-man studio in San Francisco called 2D Boy and just yesterday the lead developer, Kyle Gabler, ended his talk about how his game came to be by confirming that the title is headed to both PC and Wii. And them, while nervously looking around for Nintendo reps, he answered a follow-up by saying “I cannot speak more highly of WiiWare.”
4. At the same talk as mentioned in item #3, EA Tiburon developer Kyle Gray showed a flash demo (pictured above) and then a snippet of real gameplay of an unnamed but wholly original Nintendo DS title. It features a tea-drinking British explorer slashing a sword through waves of attacking monkeys (though the monkeys may not be in the final game) and fighting giant robots in a mech made out of a transformed Big Ben. And that’s just on the top screen. The bottom screen is a color-matching puzzle game that collects the color-coded vestiges of defeated enemies from the top screen. Players can switch to the bottom-screen puzze game to activate power-ups for their British hero. The game doesn’t have a name and this one is an internal EA project, not an endeavor that appears to have involved Nintendo outreach. But still, I very rarely see an American game designer showing off an original game for the DS. I typically expect that kind of thing to come from Japan.

Nintendo and its newfound friends in America and Europe have surprised me. It’s an interesting twist for this 2008 GDC.