During a recent interview with Waypoint, Nintendo of America president Reggie Fils-Aime talked about the excitement surrounding the recently announced core Pokémon RPG on Nintendo Switch. He also mentioned the incredible success of Pokémon GO as a driving factor behind Nintendo’s upcoming mobile app for the highly-anticipated Animal Crossing title.
Waypoint: So, Reggie, great to see you again. E3 2017 is here, and for me the big push for Switch this year, for Nintendo this year, was, at least for the Spotlight, was “Hey, we have Switch games coming. We have a lot of games coming this year, a lot of them are multiplayer focused, and by the holiday, we will have a really respectable catalogue.” And then there were also a few gestures towards the future: Yoshi, Kirby, Metroid Prime 4, Pokémon. And I’m curious what you thought of the response to those promises so far. Has that been largely positive, or mixed, or–
Reggie Fils-Aimé: The response to what we’ve showcased, and it really is just a small tip for 2018, has been exceptionally positive. You’ve got fans seeing Metroid Prime 4, hearing that Mr. Tanabe, who’s been involved in all of the Metroid Prime games, is going to be at the helm of that, the fans are tremendously excited. To hear that there’s going to be a core Pokémon RPG experience on the Nintendo Switch, the fans are incredibly excited. To see a traditional Kirby experience, with him inhaling enemies and copying abilities, fans are excited about that. And then the Yoshi game that we showcased, with that unique, you know, motion to go “behind-the-scenes,” so to speak, has people really intrigued. So just by showcasing those four games, and giving a little bit of a taste, yeah there’s a lot of excitement to what 2018 can hold.
But to be clear, we look at E3 in the here and now. Our focus is on games that are largely going to be available between now and the end of the holiday season. And when you look at that lineup, there’s a strong game coming literally every month, starting tomorrow with Arms, and then Splatoon 2, then in August is the Mario + Rabbids game, September, October with Super Mario Odyssey. We’ve got that great pace of content, and I can tell you there’s more to be announced.
Waypoint: Totally, though I will say that some of the response I saw to Metroid Prime 4 and to the Pokémon core RPG that’s coming to Switch was, “give us more, give us anything else,” sometimes leaning all the way towards a really frustrated response. “Anybody could promise that a Metroid Prime 4 is coming,” is kind of what you see. Was that frustrating at all given that last year, a lot of the response was “just tell us that something is coming!”
Reggie Fils-Aime: Well, look. We’ve been at every E3 that has ever happened. And the reality is: no matter what you do, and what you say, there’s always that contingent that says, “Boy, I wish you could have given us just a little bit more.” And that’s to be expected, I mean these are fans, these are folks, who either have purchased a Switch and they’re continually looking to great content to play, or, they’re evaluating whether or not to jump in, and they’re looking for more promise and more detail as to what’s coming. But either way, those fans are always going to say, “Boy, I wish I had just a little bit more information.”
But if I step back, and just look at what we’ve done to date: Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, certainly, last I looked, one of the top five games of all time. Mario Kart 8 Deluxe, and the experience behind that game, it was just announced in May that it was the number one selling individual game of May. And then obviously with the lineup that I talked about earlier, we’ve got a great lineup of games, that really are exciting to fans. Our biggest challenge really continues to be, how do we get more Switch hardware to the marketplace.
…It’s about the audience. So, specifically now, Animal Crossing. Animal Crossing development continues quite strongly, the teams are very excited about what they have. It’s an application that is going to launch this year, as we’ve committed. And we’ll be sharing more information in due course. We believe, just as we’ve seen with Pokémon Go, just as we’ve seen with Super Mario Run, Fire Emblem Heroes, we believe that the application will help broaden the user base for Animal Crossing, and it’s going to end up having a positive impact on our dedicated video game business of Animal Crossing.
Source: waypoint.vice.com
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