Nintendo has explained why some of last year’s big E3 surprises weren’t at this year’s show.

Speaking to IGN, Nintendo’s Bill Trinen explained that Nintendo wanted to focus on a shorter window this year rather than showing off some of last year’s surprises like Metroid Prime 4 and the core Pokemon RPG “There was other stuff that we probably could have included in E3, but is probably a bit further out, and so we decided to really kind of keep the focus a little bit more on between now and early 2019, which I think you saw some hints of there with a couple of games,” Trinen told IGN.“We want to show stuff when we think it's ready to show. Obviously it's not like we've stopped working on any of the things we talked about last year, that stuff's all being worked on,” Trinen added. “We'll just show stuff when we're ready to show it and really, right now, the focus is on two big games in the form of Smash and Pokemon [Let’s Go Eevee and Let’s Go Pikachu].”

Andrew is IGN’s executive editor of news and just misses scanning stuff in Metroid . You can find him rambling about Persona and cute animals on Twitter