Interview:Famitsu April 17th 1998

http://ign64.ign.com/articles/062/062111p1.html

This week, Nintendo's Shigeru Miyamoto took the opportunity to comment on the most highly-anticipated forthcoming releases for the N64. Adopting a "wait till you see this, it'll trounce the competition" approach, Miyamoto-san was unsurprisingly upbeat while speaking to a reporter of the Japanese magazine Weekly Famitsu Magazine.

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Prospects for 1998

Question: I'd like to ask you about where Nintendo is going from here. Is that OK?

Shigeru Miyamoto: Famitsu, in its 'Let's talk about games corner' once featured me saying that if developers want to make CD-ROM games, they should go with the PlayStation. So lots of readers misunderstood and thought I was going to develop games for the PlayStation. I'm going to have to be careful what I say to you!

Question: No, don't say that! What are your feelings about the last two years?

Shigeru Miyamoto: I work for Nintendo, so I think we showed some good things, but maybe not enough variety. I don't think we had enough titles.

Question: You don't think you had enough titles, but I think the long gaps between releases were damaging.

Shigeru Miyamoto: Last year, between Starfox and Yoshi's Story we didn't produce enough Nintendo (first-party) titles. It would have been good to be able to sell Zelda and F-Zero last year. But we showed some kind of throughput; I'm just sorry it wasn't more.

Question: I have the feeling that there'll be some really big titles in 1998.

Shigeru Miyamoto: Nintendo's sales department agrees. The production division, at any rate, will be releasing hardware (the 64DD), so when that happens I hope users will feel relieved that they didn't give up on us.

Question: The N64 seems to have had a bit of a hard time in Japan.

Shigeru Miyamoto: Yes, we haven't really been able to sell it in Japan, but I'm not that worried. People ask "why are you so confident" but software is selling very well in the States and people here worry because that news doesn't reach them here in Japan. But we've sold over 10,000,000 machines worldwide.

Question: So you think there's reason to be confident?

Shigeru Miyamoto: From now and over the next year, people will be able to use the intervals between releases to save enough pocket money to buy software. The hardware's matured over the past two years, as has the software. But I can't necessarily say we're going to be selling a lot of software before Christmas.

ZELDA

Question: Zelda is highly-anticipated, isn't it?

Shigeru Miyamoto: It has Mario-esque elements, with movie-like drama. It has the same kind of expression as a movie.

Question: I'm surprised it almost has movie-like production values.

Shigeru Miyamoto: Well, it's not exactly like a movie, but uses dynamic scenarios.

Question: Did you use that kind of approach in Mario?

Shigeru Miyamoto: Hmmm, it looks better than, say, Resident Evil or Final Fantasy VII, with the combination of graphics and content. I'm not very good at PR! Don't write what I just said! (laughs)

Question: What about the mood?

Shigeru Miyamoto: You get a real impression of immersion, as if you're really in the game's world. The movement, thanks to the 3D stick, is very fluid and smooth. We've put all of our best ideas into Zelda.

F-ZERO

Shigeru Miyamoto: F-Zero's strongest characteristic is the sense of speed. Also, there are lots of opponents on screen with you.

Question: There are going to be 30 racers, right?

Shigeru Miyamoto: Yes, and besides, on the hard setting, up to 20 cars can be retired after crashes. So you can place pretty much anywhere on the scale of 1st to 30.

Question: Are the courses varied?

Shigeru Miyamoto: Yes, there are jumps, a sudden-death element, and so forth. And you can die if you skid out of the pipe (laughs).

Question: Is there a lot of variety in the cars?

Shigeru Miyamoto: You can eventually select from 30 vehicles, and you can tune them up, adding elements to the gameplay.

Thanks goes to Famitsu for this interview.