Miyamoto interested in more Western collaborations, including Zelda
Shigeru Miyamoto has said The Legend of Zelda is a prime candidate for one of Nintendo's infrequent Western collaborations.
Discussing Retro's work on Mario Kart 7 with Wired, Miyamoto indicated he'd be up for another round,
"As you know, we have already collaborated with Retro for the Metroid Prime series in the past. And I think when we talk about any other franchise, Zelda might be a possible franchise for that collaboration," he said.
Miyamoto also gave a few more details on how Retro worked with Nintendo's Japanese teams.
"Specifically, they were taking care of the design of the courses and the artwork about that. But when it comes to the gameplay and the control mechanism itself, that’s being taken care of by EAD once again," he explained.
The collaboration gave the game more freedom to cater to varying tastes and styles.
"People often say that videogames made by Western developers are somehow different in terms of taste for the players, in comparison with Japanese games. I think that means that the Western developers and Japanese developers, they are good at different fields," Miyamoto mused.
"Mario Kart, I believe, was good in order to express that kind of different taste because we have many kinds of different courses for the Mario karts to run and race around. So for each of the different courses, we could identify: Retro is supposed to take care of this course, and EAD is going to do that, and such and such.
"Then, we were able to join forces in order to realize a variety of different courses, a variety of different tastes. I think that’s one reason how it worked out well between a Japanese development team and a Western development team."
Thanks, Kotaku.