Nintendo And Seven Other Companies Designed Wii Play: Motion

Nintendo recently released a follow-up to Wii Play, titled Wii Play: Motion, using their Wii Remote Plus controller. Instead of designing the game by themselves, they had seven other video game companies such as Chunsoft and Prope help them design some of the different mini-games present in the compilation.

The image above is of president Satoru Iwata with representatives from the seven different companies, and Nintendo staff. You can find a list of the companies involved below. Past Nintendo games these companies have worked on are mentioned in brackets, followed by the mini-games they designed for Wii Play: Motion:

Good-Feel (Wario Land: Shake It!, Kirby’s Epic Yarn)

Designed Skip Skimmer and Veggie Guardin’

Chunsoft (You, Me & The Cubes)

Designed Star Shuttle and Dolphin

Mitchell (Polarium, Magnetica)

Designed Treasure Twirl and Unicycle

Skip (Chibi-Robo!, Bit Generations, and Art Style series)

Designed Pose Mii Plus and Flutter Fly

Vanpool (Freshly-Picked Tingle’s Rosy Rupeeland)

Designed Wind Runner

Arzest (First time working with Nintendo)

Designed Jump Park, Cone Zone and Spooky Search

Prope (First time working with Nintendo)

Designed Trigger Twist

In addition to the above companies, members of Nintendo’s “SPD” division spearheaded development of Wii Play: Motion. The SPD department is usually involved one way or another any time Nintendo partner with an outside developer. They were involved with Xenoblade Chronicles, Sin & Punishment 2, all the recentMetroid games, and even with The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time 3D.

Wii Play: Motion has one other aspect of development that strays from the norm. Usually, development teams within Nintendo pitch game ideas and concepts to their sales staff. In the case of Wii Play: Motion, the sales people from Nintendo and its overseas subsidiaries requested that a follow-up to Wii Play be designed using MotionPlus functionality.

If you’re curious, you can look up videos and screens for a number of the different games these companies worked on at the Wii Play: Motion website.

A big thanks to NabucaCPM for pointing us to the Iwata Asks!