Longtime Nintendo designer Yoshiaki Koizumi, producer of the Super Mario games, has done some secret experiments with Wii U-style gaming on classic systems.
(Photo: Jon Snyder/Wired.com)

LOS ANGELES — Nintendo doesn’t mess around with its classic videogame series. It will never release an action game starring its mustachioed mascot Mario until it’s a killer app, a true showcase for the hardware’s features.

Wii U’s defining characteristic is a 6-inch touchscreen built into the game’s controller. It can serve as a control method, a second display or both. You could play games that require a player to look at both screens, or a game might be programmed to display on just the controller screen so that someone else could use the television.

Which will the next Mario game use? Nobody knows yet, especially since the producer of the games says even he wasn’t privy to many of Wii U’s secrets prior to E3.

“As a developer at Nintendo, I had some information about the new system, but I didn’t really have all of the information prior to the announcement at our presentation,” said Super Mario producer Yoshiaki Koizumi in an interview last month at E3 Expo, the annual videogame conference here.

“I only knew some of the things that were considered to be safe,” he said.

Nintendo is legendary for its secrecy. While many announcements from its rivals often leak ahead of their E3 presentations, it’s rare to see Nintendo’s big projects before the company is ready to unveil them. This is all thanks to Nintendo’s tight security — even its own core employees operate on a need-to-know basis.

With the cat officially out of the bag, Wired.com spoke to Koizumi and The Legend of Zelda producer Eiji Aonuma at E3 Expo to pick their brains about how their games might use Wii U’s unique controls.

Nintendo showed a game called New Super Mario Bros. Mii at E3, but this 2-D series of games isn’t Koizumi’s department — he’s the head of the team that makes 3-D games like Super Mario Galaxy. Koizumi says his team will make a game in the series for Wii U, but that it’s still in the early phase.

“We’re always asking ourselves questions like this as we’re researching new games, about the opportunities presented by the hardware,” he said.

Although the Super Mario Mii demo was used to show how the Wii U can display a single-player game on the television or controller, Koizumi’s thoughts went elsewhere when I asked how he might want to use the Wii U controller.

“When I think about the two screens being used at the same time, it seems like an interesting opportunity to allow us to create a console game where two people are playing at the same time but can’t see each others’ screens,” he said. “It’s certainly an interesting approach, but I have to clarify that it’s not something that we’re working on just yet.”

Koizumi said he worked on something similar years ago, a game that connected the Nintendo 64 and original black-and-white Game Boy systems to play on two screens. But he clammed up when I pressed him for details, only saying that it was a feature that was cut from The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask.

“The information’s going to be shared at some point, but I don’t think today’s the time,” he said.

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