Miyamoto: Pikmin 3 should have been a Wii U launch title

Nintendo’s creative mastermind Shigeru Miyamoto says Pikmin 3 ought to have been a Wii U launch title.

He told Time Magazine, that the line-up was not ‘as robust’ as he’d have liked, and a triple-A, high quality game like Pikmin would have helped

He said: "If you look back at the launch of Wii, we were able to prepare a game like Wii Sports, which at the time was clearly a new game, and launch that alongside a Zelda game. With the Wii U, we took a similar approach by launching Nintendo Land as well as a Mario game — though we’re working on Zelda for Wii U, that’s going to take us a little big longer.

"From my perspective, I think ideally it would have been nice if we’d been able to release Pikmin 3 closer to launch, but the Wii U — though it shares the Wii name — can do a lot more, and in the process of developing a lot of the features, the resources required to best utilize those features drew on some of the same resources that might have been spent developing games, thus we weren’t able to bring quite as robust a line-up initially."

And Miyamoto hinted there’s some innovative new concepts coming from Nintendo. And didn’t rule out the possibility of creating a new character, either:

"Whenever I start working on something I always start with creating new gameplay. After that gameplay becomes more concrete, we look at which character is best suited to the gameplay. The ideal situation would be that we’re creating an experience that’s so unique that we can present it to consumers with a new character or IP in a way that would be easiest for them to really understand the concept. But it may also be that in some of those cases it makes more sense for it to involve some of the characters that are more familiar to our fans.

"When we created the original Wii Sports, we could have done it as a Mario Sports” game, but we decided not to. Similarly with Wii Fit, that could have been a Mario Fitness” game.

"It may be that in the future, as we’re generating new ideas, we’ll come across an idea that makes the most sense to release with a new character."