Miyamoto discusses how Nintendo approaches franchises, talks a bit about 1080°

Nintendo has a lot of franchises at its disposal. There are obviously heavy-hitters like Mario and Zelda, but the company has created plenty of smaller series as well.

Shigeru Miyamoto explained some of the thoughts that go into revisiting franchises in the latest issue of ONM. Ultimately, as Nintendo has said before, the company tends to looking at “what type of game style we want to create and what type of new experience we’re creating” as opposed to picking a franchise and going from there.

Miyamoto explained to the magazine:

There are franchises where you would want to put in time and the energy because if you don’t spend enough time and energy on it, it could impact the value of the franchise and the popularity of the franchise. Certainly, with something like Star Fox, we’ve released additional games in the series. I guess with our internal teams in particular, they tend to gravitate more towards bigger franchises… games like the Marios and Zeldas.

For us, it’s less about choosing which franchise we’re going to create and more about choosing what type of game style we want to create and what type of new experience we’re creating and that’s limited internally by the number of different teams who can create those ideas.

ONM had mentioned that it would love to see the 1080° return. About the series, Miyamoto said:

I guess we could have looked at different approaches with 1080 [1080° Snowboarding] on N64 and tried to find ways to extend that franchise or build it in a way so we could maintain that brand until now… but it’s always a difficult decision in terms of which ones to choose.

Thanks to joclo for the tip.