Nintendo expanding EAD Tokyo team, Miyamoto on leveraging Retro and Next Level, more
Yesterday we heard from Shigeru Miyamoto that Nintendo has “been working on what we can do to increase our internal staff in a way that will allow us to have more projects going at the same time”. One way in which Nintendo hopes to expand is through its EAD Tokyo team, the developers behind the Super Mario Galaxy and Super Mario 3D titles.
Miyamoto told IGN that he’s been collaborating with Yoshiaki Koizumi “on what we can do to allow the Tokyo studio to create more games.” Nintendo has already started to “gradually” increase that studio’s team.
“We’re doing this not by going out of house to different companies and having them develop games for us, but instead by working with partner companies and subsidiaries in a way that allows the Tokyo studio to run more projects.”
When it comes to Retro Studios, Miyamoto said: “Certainly we do feel that we want to leverage the capabilities of Retro Studios further, because as we’ve seen from the Metroid games, they’re a very capable studio.”
And when asked why Nintendo has been shifting its thinking and leaning more on its own teams, Miyamoto stated:
“In the past, we had what we called the collaboration projects, which were sort of like an outside company almost doing a cover of our games with their own studios. The determination that we’ve come to more recently is that we prefer to have an internal Nintendo producer who’s there to oversee any outside development work that’s happening, to make sure that it’s in line with what we expect out of our games. I guess in one sense, some of those outside companies that we worked with, they also have a tendency to continue to work on the same projects over time. They tend to look more like internal companies or internal partners than they really actually are.”
Miyamoto concluded by noting how Nintendo is very much committed to its various divisions including Retro Studios and Next Level Games:
“The development style that we have with those companies is much closer to our own internal development style. It allows us to expand our resources.”
