Wii Sports Resort island is a character

Nintendo's star thinker Shigeru Miyamoto has revealed that the island in Wii Sports Resort is a character, and we will see it time and time again across games spanning many different genres.

"I had been thinking about the Island Concept in one form or another for more than 10 years," reveals Miyamoto during an Iwata Asks interview on Wii.com.

"One part of Nintendo's business has been creating a whole host of characters which we have then licensed out. But I've always thought, seeing as we are a games company, that in addition to characters resembling people, why couldn't we also turn the actual stages of games into characters?" he recalls. "And also licensing it out as a franchise."

Miyamoto says Nintendo has discussed the idea for a "long time", and that the Wii Fit locale of Wuhu Island concept is "more or less the same".

"We really polished up the island, turned it into a resort and actually made the location into a kind of character. This will then lead to a range of island series," explains Miyamoto. "You could have adventure games, role-playing games, city-building simulation games... It will be fun to see all the ideas that we can come up with, won't it?

"We thought it would be a fun idea to have a location that everyone knows and then have all sorts of stuff going on there," he adds. "It would mean that players would already know the town like the back of their hands by the time they came to buy the next adventure game."

Wii Sports Resort launches here on 24th July and showcases the new Wii MotionPlus accessory.

We'll deliver our full analysis soon. Until then, head over to our recent hands-on impressions to see how Wii Sports Resort is shaping up.