IGN and Miyamoto

IGN was able to track down Miyamoto and ask him a few things. Here they are all in one place.

About the next Zelda *1:

"The Zelda team in particular always works on Zelda titles. The core members of the Zelda team have for a very long time now been focused on Zelda games, and continue to focus on Zelda games, so they are hard at work and working away, and then, of course, we have the DS Zelda team as well, so even there we're having some switching of people in and out where the DS team is mixing in with the Wii team and working on the Wii version...I don't necessarily think it will change that drastically, but I think that Zelda is a franchise that does need some big new unique ideas and so the team right now is very focused on trying to find those ideas."

Wave Race and 1080 *2:

"Well, of course I worked on both 1080 and Wave Rave, so on the one hand I think it's very difficult for me to say, but I think that form in which we present the snowboarding game [in Wii Fit] and the power cruising game in Wii Sports Resort is something that's going to appeal to a much broader audience. And really, what I'm trying to do is find a way to bring these interactive experiences to as many people as possible. So I think for the time being I'm probably going to focus my attention on more of that, but if I find something that's particularly interesting or a way to take that and develop it into a much richer experience, I can't say that I'm not going to do that."

Storage *3:

"There isn't anything that we can announce today, but we have been thinking along a variety of different lines regarding this matter for some time now. So my hope is that sometime in the not too distant future we will be able to discuss some concrete solutions."

WiiSpeak *4:

Why it's not included:

"In all honesty, it's just in relation to cost. I'm sure there are plenty of people out there who want to play Animal Crossing over Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection. Maybe just as it is. There may be some people who want to use a USB keyboard to chat and we're fine with that. And there may be others who want to use something like WiiSpeak. So just from a cost perspective and being able to provide the game to everybody, we thought that was the best way to go."

On why it's not a headset:

"Basically, our idea with WiiSpeak is rather than to just provide a voice-chat function, we want to really connect living rooms to each other. In that sense, the microphone in WiiSpeak is really designed to be able to clearly capture many different voices being spoken in a room at the same time and convey that over the Internet. It's a very capable microphone and it's designed with that intent. And so that's why WiiSpeak has taken on the form that it has."

On background noise:

"Actually, that functionality is also very good and that's probably what's contributing to the cost of it."

On MS's Avatars *5:

"I don't really use the term avatar to refer to what we've done with the Miis. We created the Miis with the idea that the people you live with in your house or family, you also live together with inside the TV, and you can use those characters interchangeably in the games you play. To see that a company like Microsoft has taken something we've done and kind of looked at it in a way and brought it out on their platform to kind of show that we've done has become the standard, I find quite flattering. But on the other hand, I think probably the basic ideas behind perhaps those two different systems are different and because of that I think they will probably develop in different ways."

Sources:
[1, 2, 3, 4, 5]