Miyamoto on bringing back Kid Icarus and Mother
The father of Mario talks about bringing back classic franchises like Kid Icarus and Earthbound / Mother.
In an interview with
GameInformer at the E3 Media & Business Summit last week, Nintendo's Shigeru Miyamoto was pressed on the possibility of classic franchises like
Earthbound / Mother and
Kid Icarus being reinvented for Wii.
Metroid was the franchise to get that treatment on GameCube last generation, and appealing to the nostalgic, 'old skool' gamers was a massive challenge in its self, but Miyamoto was asked about the consideration that goes into catering to the younger players.
"I think that the most important thing is coming up with a new design," he said.
"That really is the core—coming up with game play designs that are better suited to the newer audiences that have come up and are starting to play video games.
"But at the same time, obviously through interviews with the media and interactions with people in the game industry I have a direct line to the burning passion that a lot of people who have been in this industry for a long time have for a lot of those older franchises," he said, laughing.
"I think in a lot of those cases what we do is we look at maybe a theme from a past game or a game design element and we might come up with an idea in how we can take that and make it new and make it fresh again, and then at a time like that we might say, “Oh okay, it’s a fun game, it’s a fun gameplay element.” If we want to appeal to the newer, younger gamers as well as the people who have been in the industry for a long time, maybe we can take this game from the past and use that game to bring that new game design idea to them. So it’s really kind of a balance between the two of those."
With the
Super Smash Bros., Nintendo's managed to bring back Ness from the
Earthbound / Mother franchise, and in the next installment, it'll be re-introducing Pit, from
Kid Icarus. Do either of these cases mean that full-blown games based on these franchises are in development?
"Well, my development teams aren’t working on either of those franchises right now," admitted Miyamoto.
"Of course Nintendo has a lot of development teams that it works with. On those development teams are a lot of people that are Nintendo fans and on those teams there are a lot of people who are constantly telling us, “Oh we want to make a new Kid Icarus.” So you never know when something like that might happen.
"As for Mother, that’s a slightly more complicated matter that I can’t really answer because it’s really up to Mr. Itoi is to whether or not he’s interested in continuing that franchise," he continued.
"But I can say that Mr. Itoi and I are still on very good terms and we enjoy working together."
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