Retro Studios Could Work on Zelda, says Miyamoto

[darksnowman]

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.

 

Wired.com love to ask long questions, don't they. However, that one yields an interesting tidbit of info from Miyamoto - Retro Studios would be a good fit for working with the Zelda series. This is something that has been speculated about quite a bit over the years, do you still want it to happen or after Skyward Sword do you think Zelda is in good enough hands, internally at Nintendo?