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When we first saw Wii Sports Resort last year, all Nintendo had available were three of the game’s events: swordplay, power cruising, and Disc Dog. It turns out that those three (quite polished) events are pretty much all that existed at the time. In the latest Iwata Asks interview, the Wii Sports Resort team reveals that they didn’t have anything but the idea of maybe doing another sequel until three months before E3 2008. Above, you can see what had been done: a MotionPlus test involving a virtual toy.

As usual, the Iwata Asks interview is full of surprisingly forthright discussion about the inner workings of Nintendo, including the team (and Shigeru Miyamoto) expressing its elation about a MotionPlus delay that allowed for more work on Resort, everyone’s relative confusion at Miyamoto’s “Wuhu Island” franchise idea, and, best of all, Miyamoto’s deceptive methods of team motivation.

At one point, Miyamoto announced in an interview that golf would be in Wii Sports Resort, and that the MotionPlus would allow backswing to control the strength of the swing, instead of just speed — and the team had to rush to actually put golf in the game afterward. Later, he describes how he faked a directive from Satoru Iwata to add an extra game mode. And apparently a programmer couldn’t demonstrate the archery feature for Miyamoto because he was too nervous to aim the bow properly.

Shigeru Miyamoto sounds like kind of a jerk, actually.

Wii Sports Resort’s E3 2008 demo completed in three months originally appeared on Joystiq on Tue, 07 Jul 2009 20:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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