This past April, two different sources of mine at Retro Studios told me in this story, that their company has 1) already received development kits for Nintendo’s next console (Wii U as revealed at E3) and 2) begun development for a game that is “a project everyone wants us to do”. Paul Gale Network had its own ideas of what the game could be, as well as a great response from all of you…however even up until now, I am personally still in the dark about what it is. The good news though, is that like with with other games in the past, including Title Fight most recently, I may know sooner than later.
For now, however, comes some potential extra fuel for the fire of a new Zelda being the project that Retro Studios is working on. Read the following portion of an interview with Shigeru Miyamoto to draw your own speculations. Here’s to whatever Retro Studios is working on, truly being a masterpiece for Wii U!
Wired.com: It’s come out since Mario Kart 7 came out, there have been some articles about how Retro Studios was very deeply involved in the making of this game, and it’s considered a landmark for the series because you had this collaboration between EAD and Retro. And I’m curious as to whether you think that this would be an interesting model for more games, like a Mario platformer or a Zelda game, to have a Western team and a Japanese team working in close concert to produce a game like that.
Miyamoto: First of all, let me talk a little bit more in detail about how we collaborated with Retro Studios this time. Of course, they were taking care of the game designing aspect. Specifically, they were taking care of the design of the courses and the artwork about that. But when it comes to the gameplay and the control mechanism itself, that’s being taken care of by EAD once again.
People often say that videogames made by Western developers are somehow different in terms of taste for the players, in comparison with Japanese games. I think that means that the Western developers and Japanese developers, they are good at different fields. And that resulted in a different taste in [their games]. Mario Kart, I believe, was good in order to express that kind of different taste because we have many kinds of different courses for the Mario karts to run and race around. So for each of the different courses, we could identify: Retro is supposed to take care of this course, and EAD is going to do that, and such and such. Then, we were able to join forces in order to realize a variety of different courses, a variety of different tastes. I think that’s one reason how it worked out well between a Japanese development team and a Western development team.
As you know, we have already collaborated with Retro for the Metroid Prime series in the past. And I think when we talk about any other franchise, Zelda might be a possible franchise for that collaboration.
For the full interview, please visit Wired.com.