Namco Bandai discussed bringing the Ridge Racer series to Wii yet felt that it wouldn’t suit the target audience.
Such comments were made by Masaya Kobayashi, who has long been associated with the series, during an interview with SPOnG in which he revealed that the developer decided to create family-friendly titles such as Family Ski and Go Vacation instead.
“After making three Ridge Racer titles, my team was asked to make a new title for the Wii,” Kobayashi explains. “They didn’t specify to make a new IP – in fact I think the company was probably asking me to make a Ridge Racer for it! But I thought that if it was for the Wii, the target audience is obviously different so I didn’t want to make a Ridge Racer for the Wii.”
He continues, “Since it was the first time we made a game for the platform, we had to get some research data – when we looked into it, we realised that the target audience for the console was families. So rather than make a really hardcore game, we wanted to make a family-based game. I told the executives that if we were doing a Wii title than Family Ski would go down better. I presented my research, and the bosses trusted me to go ahead with it.”
Kobayashi: “I didn’t want to make a Ridge Racer for the Wii”
