Shigeru Miyamoto, General Manager at Nintendo and Mario's papa, has been floating around the US over the past few days. You might have even seen him make a guest appearance on a number of popular YouTube shows, such as Rosanna Pansino's Nerdy Nummies, iJustine, and later Smosh on January 5. He also took time to sit down with ABC News to chat about some of the biggest recent developments, like amiibo availability and Sony's massive information leak.
Last week, we learned that Sony was in talks with producer Avi Avrad for a potential Mario animated film. Miyamoto's thoughts on those plans?
What's interesting is that over the past 20 years, people come to us on a fairly regular basis about creating 'Mario' movies. There are times that those ideas end right when they bring them to us, and other times we'll listen to presentations. It's not very unusual, and it's something we've been doing for a very long time. I don't particularly have a vision that the next iteration of 'Mario' is going to be in film.
He also talked about amiibo and brought up "amiibo cards," which were lightly touched upon when amiibo were first revealed but haven't quite been discussed since. These cards may offer functionality that discontinued amiibo once possessed:
We're not making promises for certain figures, but the way 'amiibo' is designed is that certain games can have 'amiibo' specifically for that game. Other games can take advantage of past 'amiibo' that developers want to make their game compatible with. In the future, we have the option, if certain 'amiibo' figures are no longer available in stores, to release an 'amiibo' in card form with the same functionality.
And sadly, despite fans' desire to see Mario back in a brand-new mainline follow-up to Super Mario 3D World, Miyamoto believes that we'll have to wait until Nintendo's next console to see Mario's next evolution.
There's more stuff to read in the full interview, namely concerning the upcoming Zelda and Star Fox Wii U games.
