portion of a Wired interview with Cammie Dunaway...

Wired.com: You’ve announced major games for the first half of the year. Do you see the game industry moving toward a more year-long release schedule, in general?

Dunaway: One of the things that’s true for Nintendo is that we’re not driven by a calendar for our release dates. When the games are ready to go, when the quality is perfect, that’s when we release. We all benefit if we can keep a pretty steady pace, so the development teams have worked hard to make sure that we’ve got a full lineup this year. If you compare the first half of 2010 with the first half of 2009, it’s night and day. And from some of the things that Mr. Iwata has talked about, and that we will talk about at E3, like Zelda, you know that we’re going to have a good back half of the year, as well.

Wired.com: I think people were really interested to know, are they going to release Mario and Metroid and Zelda all in one year?

Dunaway: And you said we wouldn’t. You bet no, right?

Wired.com: I bet no. Are you going to hold me to that? Do I owe you a steak dinner?

Dunaway: I think you do.

Wired.com: I think what people think a lot when they look at games like Fatal Frame or a game that just came out in Japan called Zangeki no Reginleiv is, jeez, if only this game wasn’t published by Nintendo, because I’d be playing it right now. If this game had been published by someone else, it would have been brought to the U.S. It’s kind of frustrating, sometimes. It just seems like there must be some way, some how, to get people access to those games.

Dunaway: I was expecting you to ask about Xenoblade and The Last Story!

Wired.com: That was my next question!

Dunaway: It’s too early to say whether we’re going to bring those here; we just found out about them when Mr. Iwata announced them at the conference (in Japan). Another way that some of this unique content is coming is through more digital content, and the title Photo Dojo is a great example of something that’s wacky Japanese fun that might not have been able to be released as a piece of packaged software. But it makes perfect sense for DSiWare.