Despite being a sequel to a game that's only a few years old, Wii Sports Resort (in one form or another) has been ten years in the making says Miyamoto.
Scratching your head a little and wondering whether Nintendo invented a time travel peripheral? Understandable. A chunk of the latest Iwata Asks interview, in which the Nintendo president chats with key Nintendo players, sheds some light on it.
Iwata asked Takayuki Shimamura, of Nintendo's EAD Software Development Department, "Was Miyamoto-san expecting a sequel?" The response went, "Um, no… Well, he actually spoke about an island. It was known as the 'Island Concept'."
Nintendo guru Shigeru Miyamoto chipped in to say, "I had been thinking about the 'Island Concept' in one form or another for more than ten years.
"I’ve always thought, seeing as we are a games company, that in addition to characters resembling people, why couldn’t we also turn the actual stages of games into characters?... And also licensing it out as a franchise."
Miyamoto noted that "We also experimented on Wii Fit by making a large island." Asked by Iwata whether the island in Wii Sports Resort is actually the same as the Wii Fit island, Miyamoto noted, "It’s called Wuhu Island, but the concept is more or less the same. We really polished up the island, turned it into a resort and actually made the location into a kind of character. This will then lead to a range of island series…"
He went on to suggest that an "island series" could lend itself to different genres, including "adventure games, role-playing games, city-building simulation games". Later Miyamoto expanded, saying, "We thought it would be a fun idea to have a location that everyone knows and then have all sorts of stuff going on there." Like Disneyland.
Scratching your head a little and wondering whether Nintendo invented a time travel peripheral? Understandable. A chunk of the latest Iwata Asks interview, in which the Nintendo president chats with key Nintendo players, sheds some light on it.
Iwata asked Takayuki Shimamura, of Nintendo's EAD Software Development Department, "Was Miyamoto-san expecting a sequel?" The response went, "Um, no… Well, he actually spoke about an island. It was known as the 'Island Concept'."
Nintendo guru Shigeru Miyamoto chipped in to say, "I had been thinking about the 'Island Concept' in one form or another for more than ten years.
"I’ve always thought, seeing as we are a games company, that in addition to characters resembling people, why couldn’t we also turn the actual stages of games into characters?... And also licensing it out as a franchise."
Miyamoto noted that "We also experimented on Wii Fit by making a large island." Asked by Iwata whether the island in Wii Sports Resort is actually the same as the Wii Fit island, Miyamoto noted, "It’s called Wuhu Island, but the concept is more or less the same. We really polished up the island, turned it into a resort and actually made the location into a kind of character. This will then lead to a range of island series…"
He went on to suggest that an "island series" could lend itself to different genres, including "adventure games, role-playing games, city-building simulation games". Later Miyamoto expanded, saying, "We thought it would be a fun idea to have a location that everyone knows and then have all sorts of stuff going on there." Like Disneyland.
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