This information comes from producer Shinjiro Takata…
“I’m not too sure, since this all happened a long time ago. But the way it all started, Atlus was involved with Nintendo when we were making a purikura [Japanese photo booth] app for the Nintendo DSi and the Nintendo 3DS. Then there was a conversation that started about whether Atlus might be in charge of making a new Fire Emblem game. It wasn’t anything serious at the time. I think we turned it down at first because we had too much on our plates.”
It turns out that Mario Maker isn’t the only playable Nintendo game at Best Buy! We’re hearing reports that Zelda: Tri Force Heroes is also at the events taking place today (and likely for Saturday as well). Remember: you can check to see if you have a Best Buy nearby hosting the event here.
Fire Emblem Fates is a long game. So much so that it’s the longest entry in the entire series thus far with 28 chapters. That tidbit of information was just shared during the Treehouse Live segment!
The quotes below come from Scott Moffitt, executive vice president of sales and marketing at Nintendo of America, who spoke with GamesBeat…
On the surprises he’s seen now that the conferences have aired…
Scott Moffitt: From a Nintendo standpoint, our goal this year, our objective, was to showcase how we can leverage the power and imagination of our developers to transform how people are playing on our platforms. With iconic franchises like Mario, like Star Fox, or new franchises like Amiibo, you combine that with the imagination of our developers and you get magic.
What emerges are games like Star Fox, a new and exciting version of Star Fox that fans haven’t seen before. It has walker capabilities, two-screen gameplay, the drone capability. That’s an exciting game that fans reacted well to and they’re looking forward to it. It’ll be a big seller this holiday.
You take Amiibo. We’re transforming what consumers have come to expect in the world of toys-to-life. We’ll be the first with Amiibo Cards in Animal Crossing and Happy Home Designer. You’ll see how you can leverage smart cards, Amiibo Cards with the same NFC read-write capability. You can use that to energize or re-imagine a game like Animal Crossing that people have loved in the past.
On how it seemed like a lot of information that could be conveyed through cards, as opposed to toys…
Moffitt: They’re going to be easy for consumers to trade. We’ve announced 100 of them coming so far. There’s a great breadth of cards out there for fans to buy and to collect and trade. You’ll be able to do great things with them. There are special cards and regular cards. You can save your home design to that card and then bring it to someone else’s game. That’s an interesting application of the technology. We’re transforming what people have come to expect in Amiibo.
With Super Mario Maker, we had a great reaction. It’s a game we’ve shown before, but now it’s on the precipice of coming to market. We’re all about showing things that will be playable this year. We have 14 total games that we’re launching between now and the end of the year. That’s a lot of exciting content for fans – eight on Wii U, six on 3DS. The imagination of creativity, the transforming power of all those franchises, is spectacular.
With Super Mario Marker, for the first time, gamers are going to be able to play game designer and design their own levels and challenge others to complete their level. They can play other people’s levels. Celebrities, fans, YouTubers—you may have levels posted by people from all walks of life — kids, adults, pros, non-pros. We think people are going to have a lot of fun building imaginative and creative gameplay of their own with Mario. It’s transforming what people expect. You have a 30-year-old franchise in Super Mario, and now it’s re-imagined with user-generated creations.
