GI: Nintendo brought back Metroid with the GameCube with huge success and made all the fans happy that wanted to see Metroid back on a home console. Yet, it’s got to be a risk taking into consideration the younger players when you’re thinking about bringing back a famed franchise—especially one that’s older and hasn’t been on a console for a long time such as an Earthbound or Kid Icarus title. How do you gauge that when you’re looking at bringing one of those games back? And how do you try to appeal to all ages?

Miyamoto: I think that the most important thing is coming up with a new design. That really is the core—coming up with game play designs that are better suited to the newer audiences that have come up and are starting to play video games. But at the same time, obviously through interviews with the media and interactions with people in the game industry I have a direct line to the burning passion that a lot of people who have been in this industry for a long time have for a lot of those older franchises. (laughs) I think in a lot of those cases what we do is we look at maybe a theme from a past game or a game design element and we might come up with an idea in how we can take that and make it new and make it fresh again, and then at a time like that we might say, “Oh okay, it’s a fun game, it’s a fun gameplay element.” If we want to appeal to the newer, younger gamers as well as the people who have been in the industry for a long time, maybe we can take this game from the past and use that game to bring that new game design idea to them. So it’s really kind of a balance between the two of those.

GI: You’re doing a good job with Smash Bros.—you’re bringing back Ness and you’ve got Pit now—but the hardcore fans, the old school are looking for more than just beating the crap out of each other with those characters, so are those franchises something we may see in the future?

Miyamoto: (laughs) Well, my development teams aren’t working on either of those franchises right now. Of course Nintendo has a lot of development teams that it works with. On those development teams are a lot of people that are Nintendo fans and on those teams there are a lot of people who are constantly telling us, “Oh we want to make a new Kid Icarus.” So you never know when something like that might happen.

As for Mother, [ed: Earthbound], that’s a slightly more complicated matter that I can’t really answer because it’s really up to Mr. Itoi is to whether or not he’s interested in continuing that franchise. But I can say that Mr. Itoi and I are still on very good terms and we enjoy working together. (laughs)

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