Satoru Iwata chats to some of Donkey Kong Country Returns staff about the new title.

The Iwata Asks series sees the Nintendo President asking developers and producers about their games and it often results in some fascinating insights into the process by which the games have been made. With today's release of Donkey Kong Country Returns in Europe and its recent release in America Nintendo has posted Satoru Iwata's interview with several Retro Studios staff.

Kynan Pearson, Mike Wikan and Tom Ivey, all senior designers from Retro Studios, were in attendance as well as Kensuke Tanabe, producer, and Risa Tabata, assistant producer, who are both from Nintendo. The bi-lingual conversation gave many fascinating insights into how the title came to be.

During the conversation the members discuss the game's difficulty level, what it was like for Retro Studios to switch from Metroid to Donkey Kong and trying to preserve the graphical style of the original titles. Snippets of the discussion can be seen below but for the full conversation head over to Nintendo.

"That's very true. Toward the end of development, we had some serious discussions. During that serious time, I was describing Donkey Kong's actions to you and Tabata-san using gestures and mimicking his voice—Oo ee! Oo ee!—and everyone suddenly bust up laughing!"

"Whenever I begin a new project, I try to think about what we can do that's new and hasn't appeared before or about what kind of inventive game mechanics we can include. That's something that Miyamoto-san beat into me when I was in the Entertainment Analysis and Development Division."

"One thing that's different from the New Super Mario Bros. Wii multiple-player mode is we haven't used collision detection between players. So if you play together with someone at about the same skill level as you, you can double up and advance at an incredible speed, which allows you to enjoy a speed and feeling that's different from Mario games."