The hardware evolution was too tempting to deny, Miyamoto said, not just the evolution from Wii to Wii U, but the addition of the Motion Plus peripheral for the original Wii's controller.

"Well, of course back in the early days, we were working on it based on the Wii hardware," Miyamoto said. "What we quickly found was, particularly for the controls in Pikmin, not just the basic Wii Remote but the Wii Remote with the Motion Plus technology really made the controls more intuitive, and much more precise and accurate for us. That was a big change when we shifted from standard Wii Remote and nunchuck to Motion Plus.

"The other was, particularly when we were looking at what would be possible on the Wii U hardware, one of the big things was just the HD visuals and the ability to draw the detailed graphics. The other was, of course, the use of the subscreen on the GamePad. As soon as we saw the convergence of these different elements, we felt that we'd be able to do a much better job if we took this game and put it on the Wii U."

"they hear the name Wii U, and because it shares the Wii name, the assumption is, 'Oh, it would be very easy to take whatever was on Wii and just move it to Wii U'"

Many of its fans assumed Pikmin 3 would be a launch title on Nintendo's new hardware, given that it was announced a full year and a half before the console was released. It missed the launch window by a significant margin; the Wii U will be almost nine months old when Pikmin 3 launches on August 4. I asked Miyamoto if he wished Nintendo had gotten Pikmin 3 out sooner, to bolster the first-party presence on the Wii U during its launch.

"I did want to release it sooner," Miyamoto said, laughing.

"One of the big challenges was that I think that a lot of people, they hear the name Wii U, and because it shares the Wii name, the assumption is, 'Oh, it would be very easy to take whatever was on Wii and just move it to Wii U,'" Miyamoto said. "But in fact, the jump in a hardware standpoint, both from the development structure and the chipset within the system, it was such a dramatic change from what we had with Wii that development of the game, we had to recreate it to move it over to Wii U. So that was one of the challenges."