Nintendo of Australia has just announced that they will be the official gaming supplier of the 2008 Australian Open. Nintendo will make their presence known in Australia by holding competitions for Wii Sports and Sight Training for the whole duration of the Open outside the Vodafone Arena.

Here we see yet again the levels to which the Nintendo Wii has permeated society! We fully expect the competitions held on the Wii Sports at the Open to be just as competitive as the real thing! People are going absolutely mad for this console and we think with good reason. Nintendo sponsoring the Australian open is just another excellent avenue to expose previous non-gamers to the delights this console can offer all the family.

People who enter will have to compete against rivals for the tennis championship for the Wii. Those who become the daily champions will get to take home a Wii console and a copy of Wii Sports. The winner will get tickets to see the Men’s Finals and have a Wii Sports tennis play off against Mark Philippoussis, an Australian tennis player who became a finalist in various tennis tournaments such as the U.S. Open, Australian Open, and Wimbledon.

Nintendo’s intentions are to bring to all the opportunity to play tennis at this very popular event which will be taking place at Melbourne Park from January 14-27 this year. This little box of electronics really is taking gaming to a whole new level. The prospect of playing Philippoussis in the grand Wii final and actually having a chance of beating him is, whilst probably a pipe dream, a huge draw for tennis lovers of all ages, shapes and sizes! We predict the Nintendo Wii Sports championship at this event will be a great success.

With Nintendo’s sponsorship for the 2008 Australian Open, Rose Lappin, managing director for Nintendo Australia said, “Both the Wii Championships and Nintendo Sight Training Lounge at the Australian Open, will showcase the diversity and broad appeal of Nintendo’s products.”

We couldn’t agree more. This is a smart move on the part of Nintendo and we fully expect them to sponsor other sporting events with a similar goal of introducing this clever, new-gen console to a much wider variety of users. With a truly revolutionary games machine and a sound marketing team 2008 should easily see the Wii reaching its predicted 8 million sales. We’d hazard a guess that it’ll actually sell quite a bit more than that. If you don’t have your Wii yet why not see if there’s a wii console for sale on this site.

Source: Gamespot