Whilst Nintendo may well be assuring everyone that the Wii owners that are desperate for their ‘core’ gaming fix, with another Mario and Zelda being promised, it would appear that nothing is really on the near horizon after all, meaning a little more patience is required.

According to Nintendo’s President Satoru Iwata, once again it was reiterated that the hardcore fans would be looked after, but only in due course and certainly not any time before Spring 2009 it would seem. Speaking to SpiegelOnline, Iwata-san confirmed that Nintendo was not neglecting its stalwart fans, but nothing could be shown off at E3 because there was not that much to reveal at the moment, as translated by gamerTM.

“We understand, that people were disappointed [with Nintendo’s E3 line-up]. But you have to consider that E3 is always a good play to reach a new audience – a mass audience – because the media interest is so large. So we concentrated on those games, that we are developing with new customers in mind.”

“We have never neglected our games for the hard core of gamers, and there are teams still working on such games. But it simply takes longer to finish them, two or three years. We won’t be releasing any during the beginning of 2009, so we couldn’t show any of them at E3.”

As for whether or not Nintendo had started to forget all about its ‘traditional’ fans, Iwata-san went on to say,

“No. We just didn’t show off any games for them. It takes years to make games like Mario or Zelda. We can’t announced a new one every year, but of course we are working on new games. Core gamers are still very important to us, because they bring enthusiasm for games with them, and encourage other to play games as well. It was only two years ago that we presented a revolutionary product, the Wii. This has been functioning very effectively since then, and we have expanded the circle of people who play videogames.”

With all the talk of a Kid Icarus project coming, though, perhaps fans will not have to wait too long…