Satoru Iwata and Shigesato Itoi Discuss Connections between MOTHER 2 and Animal Crossing

Shigesato Itoi’s Hobonichi office has a tradition of celebrating the release of every Animal Crossing game by turning office-wide gameplay into an actual work project. (Jealous yet?) Almost every person in the office participates and keeps a blog of their town and experiences. You can read each person’s blog by clicking on their picture. (For those of you who for whatever strange reason can’t pick out Itoi’s face, his AC blog is here.)

In conjunction with this tradition, Iwata and two members of Nintendo’s EAD visited Itoi’s office last month to hold a group discussion about Animal Crossing: New Leaf for the 3DS a few days before the game’s release.

Near the end of the discussion, Iwata brings up MOTHER 2 and reveals some interesting insight about his work on the game:

Itoi: It’d be great for people who have never played the series to play this game. It’s—well, it’s a game that doesn’t have many struggles to it. It’s just filled with wonderful things.

Iwata: “Adults, children, and even your older sister.”

Itoi: Yeah. (laughs)

Iwata: This is kind of a personal thing, but when we made MOTHER 2 and you wrote the phrase “Adults, children, and even your older sister”… if you hadn’t been focusing on that idea, I don’t think I would have ever announced Nintendo’s intentions to expand the gaming population [when I took over as president]. So that slogan of yours turned out to be critical advice for me.

Itoi: And that sense of “Adults, children, and even your older sister” is quite clear in Animal Crossing.

It’s really heartwarming to see the MOTHER series have enough of an effect on people to influence the direction of Nintendo as a company.

You can find the original Japanese article here.

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