Natsume talks Virtual Console/WiiWare support, No Harvest Moon 64 on VC, 3DS impressions

A portion of a NerdMentality interview with Natsume’s Vice President of Operations Graham Markay…

NM: I noticed that all your upcoming games are on the Nintendo DS.

GM: Yes.

NM: Is there a deliberate move towards the DS or handheld titles as opposed to console titles?

GM: Not at all. We definitely represent Sony and Nintendo equally. It just so happens that I released my last PSP game, Harvest Moon: Hero of Leaf Valley, before E3, so there was really no point in showing it because it’s readily available. So these four games here are the games we’re kind of finishing out our year with. I had four other games, Gabrielle’s Ghostly Groove: Spooktacular Edition which is WiiWare. Unfortunately it’s not ready to be seen, but it’s coming out later this year, and the other three are two Virtual Console games and another WiiWare game but all three of them just released. Definitely, we like PSP and we like PS3; we had our first PS3 title last year, and it’s not our last PS3 title.

NM: We have some huge fans of Harvest Moon 64 on our website, and we are wondering if it will ever come out on Virtual Console?

GM: It will not. It will not. And it’s not from lack of trying. Unfortunately, the code of the game is not… it’s not an easy transfer. It would be really time-consuming and long, and we’ve looked into it, and we’ve tried to see if there’s any way around certain things, but the conversion to virtual console, it’s just… I shouldn’t say it’s never going to come out, but there’s just a really, really, very small chance that it would ever come out. Which is unfortunate because we know that for a lot of dedicated, die-hard fans, that’s their favorite.

NM: What are your thoughts on the 3DS?

GM: It looks exciting. I mean, from everybody’s aspect whether it’s television manufacturers, Sony, Nintendo, it seems like 3D is the next thing. Speaking for myself and the company, yeah, it’s exciting. Speaking for myself personally, I wear glasses. So putting glasses on top of glasses is always a bit… when I take my kids to see a 3D movie, they enjoy it a little bit more than me because I always tend to not see it as well as they do because of the glasses. But it’s exciting; we are a supporter of the 3DS.