Nintendo’s Bill Trinen: No new Mario game in 2015

In a recent interview with the Reno Gazette-Journal, Bill Trinen, Senior Product Marketing manager at Nintendo of America, shared his comments about the company’s development process of new games as well as the absence of the famous plumber in new games this new year.

For many years, Nintendo has been bringing its great, new console features in Mario titles and various other games. Though we’ve seen Mario jump to other tasks besides saving Princess Peach, with different roles in Mario Party, Mario Kart, and others, Nintendo is not currently into making yearly sequels of its specific franchises.

Trinen said the following to the Reno Gazette-Journal:

Internally, what teams do when working on a new game — even if it’s an existing series — is to start out fresh and figure out what the focus will be this time. We don’t always put out a new version of an existing series on an annual basis, there’s always a big gap. You see that with Super Smash Bros., which has been seven years since it last came out. With Pikmin 3, you saw a big gap as well. Mario games release more frequently but we don’t have a new Mario game this year so it’s not an annual event. The teams focus on how they can recreate the gameplay experience or introduce new ideas to those games, which is what they did with NES Remix, for example.

Though Mario and fans have seen much of his presence in 2014, perhaps it’s time to see Mario take a break in 2015. And about variety in games, we’ve seen NES Remix, Captain Toad: Treasure Tracker, Super Smash Bros. for 3DS and Wii U in 2014, with more titles coming in 2015 such as Splatoon, Mario Maker, Kirby and the Rainbow Curse, Yoshi’s Woolly World, and the much-expected Zelda Wii U.

[Source]: Reno Gazette-Journal: Technobubble: Nintendo on making the perfect game, retro revival.