Namco Bandai could have brought Ridge Racer to Wii, went with Go Vacation instead
Namco Bandai’s Masaya Kobayashi has revealed that Ridge Racer could have been made for Wii. However, Kobayashi believed that the console’s demographic consisted more of casual gamers, so he conducted some research and told the company that making a family title would be a wiser decision.
Kobayashi said:
“After making three Ridge Racer titles, my team was asked to make a new title for the Wii. They didn’t specify to make a new IP – in fact I think the company was probably asking me to make a Ridge Racer for it! But I thought that if it was for the Wii, the target audience is obviously different so I didn’t want to make a Ridge Racer for the Wii.
“Since it was the first time we made a game for the platform, we had to get some research data – when we looked into it, we realised that the target audience for the console was families. So rather than make a really hardcore game, we wanted to make a family-based game. I told the executives that if we were doing a Wii title than Family Ski would go down better. I presented my research, and the bosses trusted me to go ahead with it.”
