Nintendo: Reggie talks about the collab. with Skylanders; mentions “new home console”
Yesterday, the Wall Street Journal published an interview with Reggie Fils-Aimé (President and COO of Nintendo of America), who talked a bit about the collaboration with Skylanders. He starts by reminding us that Activision actually came to see Nintendo at the very start of the Skylanders project, so the two companies have been thinking about how to integrate Nintendo properties in it right from the start.
But it’s when Nintendo revealed the amiibo, in 2014, that the discussions became really serious. At that time, Activision came to see Nintendo and told them about their vision for the next Skylanders game (with the cars).
For Activition, this deal allows them to create something special, that can only be found on Nintendo consoles. For Nintendo, this deal was the opportunity to create special amiibo, that players could use with both Skylanders and any other amiibo-compatible title.
Nintendo and Acitivision chose to go with Bowser and Donkey Kong (and not Link, Mario or any other Nintendo characters) for one main reason: since Skylanders is all about creatures (and not human-like characters), those two really fit within the series’ universe with their gameplay mechanics and their movements.
Later in the interview, Reggie also mentions a mysterious “new home console” that was already announced earleir this year:
We’ve also said publicly that we are already hard at work on our next home console and that’s another element we’ll be talking about much later.
Obviously, Reggie is talking about Project NX, which will be officially revealed next year. But does that mean NX is nothing but a home console? It’s a bit too earlier to say for sure, given we won’t know anything concrete until next year. There’s no doubt Satoru Iwata would have mentionned it was just a successor to the Wii U if that was really the case.
Most likely, Project NX is something more than just a home console, especially given the various statements from Satoru Iwata about the architecture of Nintendo’s next-gen platforms (and how he rejected the idea of a single platform that would be both home / portable console). But until next year, all we could is speculate!
Source: WSJ
