Multiplayer: There was a lot of talk among the hardcore gamers that they didn’t see hype a lot for [”Metroid Prime 3″] in advance. And I noticed that even with “Super Paper Mario, there wasn’t a lot of awareness of that before it came out. So on the one hand, is Nintendo shifting philosophy in terms of how early it talks about games and tightening that window so that you hear about a game much closer to the release?

Perrin Kaplan, vice president of marketing, Nintendo of America: Our marketing schedule in terms of when we talk about products really varies by the product. We are trying a couple of different approaches and that is talking about products shortly before they are launched to really try to grab the attention of people at that moment. If you talk about something too early they can’t really go buy it. We do talk about things in a smaller way and then really make the attention focused on the product two weeks prior to its launch — and then continue to talk about it when it is available at retail. So it’s a slightly different approach for us, but we think it’s working.

Multiplayer: How do you think you guys did with “Metroid”? Because at E3 I think it was [Nintendo of America localization producer] Bill Trinen who assured the audience that it was the best first-person game coming out on any console for the year. And my impression was that in terms of buzz it got swamped by “BioShock” on one side and “Halo” on the other side, which had much longer-term marketing campaigns and hype-building campaigns than “Metroid.” It seemed to kind of get lost in the shuffle with very little promotion until the 11th hour.

Kaplan: “Metroid,” for us, has sold better than we even expected, given that we know it didn’t have a long lead-up of conversation about it. The sales on it have maintained at a pretty strong level. So I think we’re impressed. It’s getting a lot of word-of-mouth and some pretty good reviews. To compare that to “Halo” is a little bit of apples to oranges. They’re different products, different experiences…

Full interview here

The Hype factor of Mario Galaxy is a lot more then we have seen for any game for the Wii so far.  With the preorder coin, and the tons of videos filtering out since E3.  I can say Nintendo is doing a heck of a good job hyping up Mario then they did Metroid.