Wired.com: You’ve announced major games for the first half of the year. Do you see the game industry moving toward a more year-long release schedule, in general?

Dunaway: One of the things that’s true for Nintendo is that we’re not driven by a calendar for our release dates. When the games are ready to go, when the quality is perfect, that’s when we release. We all benefit if we can keep a pretty steady pace, so the development teams have worked hard to make sure that we’ve got a full lineup this year. If you compare the first half of 2010 with the first half of 2009, it’s night and day. And from some of the things that Mr. Iwata has talked about, and that we will talk about at E3, like Zelda, you know that we’re going to have a good back half of the year, as well.

Wired.com: I think people were really interested to know, are they going to release Mario and Metroid and Zelda all in one year?

Dunaway: And you said we wouldn’t. You bet no, right?

Wired.com: I bet no. Are you going to hold me to that? Do I owe you a steak dinner?

Dunaway: I think you do.

Very interesting comments and not all too surprising given that both Super Mario Galaxy 2 and Metroid: Other M will be out before the year is halfway over.  Nintendo has the whole back half of 2010 to fill and I am betting that Zelda Wii will be launching before year’s end.  What do you guys think?

Full interview here