[Wired]

The creator of Super Mario Bros. has big plans for Nintendo’s future… and very small plans for his own.

Shigeru Miyamoto, the head of Nintendo’s game design efforts, sat down with Wired last week to discuss how the company plans to win more fans to its Nintendo 3DS handheld, the remarkable collaboration between developers in Kyoto and Texas that created Mario Kart 7, and another blockbuster franchise that he thinks would be a good fit for East-West cooperation.

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Wired: With Mario 3D Land, which I played the whole thing, we finally saw with Nintendo 3DS a game where I never wanted to turn the 3-D off, I always wanted to keep going in 3-D. And I saw elements in that game that played with 3-D. But to look at every other game on 3DS, where Mario is head and shoulders ahead of them, what do you do for other people who are developing for 3DS? Are you outreaching, trying to get them to do what you guys did with Mario?

Miyamoto: Well, when it comes to Super Mario 3D Land, yes, that’s something that we really wanted to do by taking advantage of the capabilities of Nintendo 3DS. However, even though we were able to make something like that, we have no intention to force others to make a similar thing at all. Rather, I believe that I want every single developer to come up with their own ideas in order to take advantage of the capabilities of the Nintendo 3DS.

And for the players as well, I hope they will be able to play just as they like. Sometimes they want to play with full 3-D and sometimes not. Taking for example Mario Kart 7, sometimes they may want to simply ease the 3-D effect and actually [steer by moving] the 3DS unit. That’s actually very fun. But at the same time, sometimes … they just might want to appreciate the 3-D effect of Mario Kart. So it actually depends upon the good balance between 3-D and not 3-D.

When it comes to other companies and other developers, all I can say is, it’s good if they are going to study the way … they can take a perfect balance. Once again, we don’t have any intention to force or even educate them to do something like Mario Kart or Super Mario 3D Land, at all. For the game players as well, I hope that they can just leisurely and casually enjoy playing with Nintendo 3DS at their will.

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Read the full interview here: http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2011-12/14/shigeru-miyamoto-looks-into-nintendos-future