Miyamoto: Mario 128 format unclear
Veteran game designer discusses gameplay experiments conducted on Cube and DS, "and there are other ideas, too". N5, perhaps?
Nintendo has yet to decide upon a target format for Mario 128, although the development team spearheaded by Shigeru Miyamoto has been running various experiments on GameCube and even Nintendo DS.
In an interview conducted during E3 and published by GameSpy this week, Shigeru Miyamoto admitted, "I just don't know if we will see that game on one system or another."
"It is still hard for me to make that decision. I am the only director on that game right now. I have the programmers making different experiments, and when I see the results, we will make the final decision," he said.
The veteran game designer even admitted that some of those 'experiments' were not simply limited to GameCube. "There have been a number of different experiment ideas that we have been running on the GameCube. There are some that we have run on DS, and there are other ideas, too."
Although Miyamoto provides no details of those 'experiments' in his interview with GameSpy, it does cast doubt on the state of the game's development, despite claims from Nintendo a year ago that Mario 128 was in a fit enough state to appear at E3.
At the time, a Nintendo spokesperson told Japanese Nintendo Dream magazine that Mario 128 was all set to appear at E3, but that the company feared that it's new gameplay ideas might be stolen by other companies, and ultimately decided against an unveiling.
Yesterday Nintendo revealed that N5 - the "revolutionary" games console alluded to during this year's pre-E3 conference - will be announced at next year's E3 event in Los Angeles. Such talk coupled with Miyamoto's uncertainty is bound to ignite speculation that Mario 128 will skip this generation of Nintendo hardware.