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TIME: Miyamoto’s on Iwata’s involvement with the Nintendo Switch, story in Zelda games

In the past few days, TIME has published several interviews with key figures at Nintendo, such as Shinya Takahashi, Tatsumi Kimishima, and Yoshiaki Koizumi. And yesterday, they published one more interview, this time with the one and only Shigeru Miyamoto. The piece is quite lengthy, and you can find it in full on this page!

In this interview, Shigeru Miyamoto shares some details about Satoru Iwata’s involvement with the Nintendo Switch, and reveals that the former president of Nintendo was in fact the head of development. He explains that if the Nintendo Switch became a device you can take out anywhere, that can be used to network and communicate with people, it’s thanks to him.

Because he was a pretty tech-savvy individual, many of the discussions with Satoru Iwata involved technical elements such as network capabilities, and more precisely how to make them fun. They also discussed about mobile devices and “new browser features”, trying to find out what to do and what not to do with the Hardware.

When asked about story in video games, and especially the Legend of Zelda series, Shigeru Miyamoto has a pretty interesting answer. He explains that with The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, Eiji Aonuma and his team found the right balance between the story and the fact players are on adventure. For him, it’s important that players are the ones going on an adventure.

Here’s what he said about that:

I think what’s important, especially for the Zelda series, is for the person to be able to think it through for themselves, and to really live the story. I think that’s the challenge we’ve been working on through the many iterations of The Legend of Zelda. And so in this game, while you’re playing, you start to kind of dig the narrative out and see the overarching story that lies in the background.

And really in this game, everybody can take very, very different routes and approaches. How long it takes to beat the game has a huge range.

The interview also covers Gunpei Yokoi’s idea of “lateral thinking with seasoned technology”, whether any tea tables were up-ended during the Nintendo Switch development, why they decided to focus on HD Rumble, Virtual Reality, Hiroshi Yamauchi and the lack of corporation philosophy, AI, and… a cat hammock.

Click here to check out the full interview!

The Nintendo Switch will be released on March 3rd.

Lite_Agent

Founder and main writer for Perfectly Nintendo. Tried really hard to find something funny and witty to put here, but had to admit defeat.

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