Hudson Entertainment president John Greiner and director of marketing John Lee speak about Nintendo's consoles and future plans.

Hudson seem to be in love with Nintendo. They were the first third-party developer for the NES, and in the past few years they have developed the Mario Party franchise, ensured that the GBA and DS received a healthy supply of Bomberman titles and recently gave Wii owners the chance to bask in classic games from the Turbografx (PC-Engine) on the Virtual Console. Gamasutra took the chance to interview Hudson president John Greiner and Hudson's director of marketing John Lee, in which they reveal some of their future plans and detail their relationship with Nintendo. Here are a few snippets from the interview.

GS: How about the Virtual Console stuff? How did it actually come about?

JG: That really came about I think, because Nintendo saw a great opportunity to give consumers a flashback - that you could do that on today's broad band lines without overbearing it. Nintendo is concerned about a great user experience. They've proved that over and over and over. They're very true to their customer and so they didn't want to put out everything on the broadband line, just the classics. There's certainly always going to be a demand for the Turbo Grafx, Genesis and the Super Famicom stuff so I don't think that they could miss on that. And obviously Hudson controlled the Turbo Grafx gate, and so they came to us and asked us to do that. We're obviously very close to Nintendo. They've always been a big supporter of Hudson, and we've supported them. And they own shares of Hudson. So I can't think of a better mentor than Nintendo and we've always been respectful of that and deals like this come about because of this long term relationships. For us the benefit of the Virtual Console is bringing all these old games back into the public eye, because you can re‑launch brands off of this, it offers such a great opportunity.

GS: Has there been any consideration to bring over some of the PC Engine titles that didn't make it here?

JG: I think so. We're going to work on the Turbo Grafx titles, but there were 600 some-odd PC Engine titles, and there were only 150 or so Turbo Grafx titles, so I think that if people tell us they want these games, absolutely. So we'll blow this up, we'll make it very visible, and we want people to tell us what they think. We've set up an 800 number for help, and that kind of thing, so we'll be able to hear what people really want, and I think there's a lot of demand for it. Wouldn't you say? [laughs]

So we're looking at seeing the entire Turbografx back catalogue over the next few years, including games that were previously only released in Japan! The Virtual Console is a realm of vast possibilities, and if only more consoles could join the list of support... Read the rest of the interview over at Gamasutra here!