I think what's really the most ideal thing is for the player themselves, within their own imagination, to carve out what they view as being the essence of the character.

Who knows how Mario will look in the future. Maybe he'll wear metallic clothes!

If it turns out that Mario doesn't really fit into the type of game I want, I wouldn't mind using Zelda as the basis of the new game.

A late game is only late until it ships. A bad game is bad until the end of time

Actually, 3D is really the most normal thing because it's how those of us with two eyes usually see the world. TVs are the unusual things in 2D!

Well, for over a year now at my desk, a prototype program of Luigi and Mario has been running on my monitor. We've been thinking about the game, and it may be something that could work on a completely new game system.

We don't pay a whole lot of attention to the Internet until people have played the game - then we pay a lot of attention to whether people liked it. We read through it and see it, but we don't take it into consideration. ... [The Internet] is not going to dictate the direction of where the game goes.