Soundwave on 16 November 2012
The dev cycle was going to be as long as it took for the Wii U to launch. If the Wii U launched next year, then the dev cycle would be 4 years.
Of course the NSMB Wii team was put on NSMB Next right away, Iwata probably in the back of his mind had in mind for a Wii successor launch.
They probably were just doing light experimentation the first year.
