Retro Studios president and CEO Michael Kelbaugh says that developers shouldn’t ignore the Wii U and says it’s more than adequate to make great games on. Kelbaugh then went onto confirm that they are hard at work on a new game, but wouldn’t divulge anymore information.
“Unfortunately, the perception is that it’s not a very powerful machine,” Kelbaugh said about the Wii U. “That’s just not true. It’s a powerhouse. It’s more than adequate to make great games on.”
“It was really fun being able to crack that open for the first time and learning HD techniques; pixel shading, having a lot more horsepower and how that impacts the team. It was really fun to watch our artists just go crazy because now they didn’t really have to worry about polygons anymore. ‘Make as many as you want!’”
Also in our interview, veteran Nintendo producer Kensuke Tanabe confirmed that Retro Studios is working on a new game, but he would not say anything more than that. This game has been in development for a few months now, as Retro wrapped work on Tropical Freeze in November and hasn’t been sitting by idly, Kelbaugh assured us.
“We love working with Donkey Kong. It’s a great character. It’s a lot of fun. We love working with Metroid Prime, with Mario Kart; those are fun, fun games to work on. So, you know, you can’t lose,” he said. “Every one of those IPs have been a lot of fun to play with and work on and [we'd] love to come back to them sometime.”