I have hope for Nintendo. They kept the SUPER? 3D butchers away from 2D Mario.

Super Smash Bros. Brawl was released in March 2008, about 15 months after the Wii launched ...

Assuming that the Wii U is launching after July 1st 2012 (a fair assumption) and the next Smash Bros. will be released a similar time after the Wii U launches, we're currently at least 27 months (and probably closer to 30 months) away from it being released. This means there would be about 3 to 6 months for conceptual work while Super Mario Bros. 3D is being completed, and about 2 years of development for Super Smash Bros.

Far too many people assume that every big named game that is announced is expected to be released at launch, which history has shown is never the case.

Hush, my darling. Still your trembling lips, and listen.

HD development in the beginning isn't going to be that different because most art assets are created in HD in the first place. HD isn't some magical thing that automatically makes development harder. Most design problems in modern console gaming - at least at Nintendo - is conceptual, not technical. They don't strictly need to know exactly how powerful the Wii U is to design a game for it.

Now I'm not saying that the launch lineup isn't going to be shit - of course it is, it always is, there will be one good game and that'll be it for months - but this doomsaying "no games until 2014" crap is already tired. Stop it.

I still say Smash won't be here till 2015.......

I'm always amazing at how little leaks there have been of Nintendo reveals, this is no exception

Nintendo: Master of secrets, even to themselves.

their either lying and tryna sound interesting or they're dumb! Clearly hiding it from developers did no good as the tablet like control got leaked anyway. all it means now is that there gonna have a lame launch year

I think every1 can expect the the launch year to be filled with ports and games from the wii franchise (wii u sports etc)

I find it sad that Nintendo doesn't even tell their Senior Producers what's going on. After all it's not an intern who says that but a veteran in the company.

But at the same time, since he doesn't say which aspects were the ones he didn't know about (it could be the power of the system), it's difficult to put this declaration in the correct perspective.

People are silly for applauding this, it's the same issue that Nintendo brings about with nearly every one of their console or handheld releases. How the hell do they expect anyone to release games for the system if they don't know anything about it? What do they honestly expect them to deliver within a year? They kept quite, that's great, but in the process they've also damaged their relationship with third party developers by limiting their experience and development time with the console.

Khuutra brought up a point about how the technical part of game development is easy in comparison to the conceptual part, that'd be perfectly fine and true if Nintendo were actually releasing a normal console, but they aren't. One of the main problems with the Wii was coming up with new ways to use the controller and they rarely worked as intended, it was just a lot of random risks and dodgy gameplay methods until a few years had passed and a few third party developers actually grasped what they could do with the controller (Red Steel 2, Shattered Memories), but by that point it was too late.

They need time to work with the hardware, have enough experience with the controller so that they confidently apply their skills to a good game and then actually make the game. If they don't, then we'll see the same thing that happened with the Wii and that is a whole bunch of poor third party ports with wonky motion control implementation and a handful of exclusive games that use the motion controller, but have such a poor implementation that it ends up hurting the overall game.