This article was originally written for TheNintendoVillage.com, a website I founded and ran from 2018 to 2021.

Following Nintendo’s earning’s report last week, there was a lot of concern around the release schedule for this year. That’s been assuaged somewhat by the announcement of Paper Mario: The Origami King, but the shadow of coronavirus still looms large over Nintendo’s plans for the year.

When asked in a recent investor Q&A about the challenges of working remotely, Nintendo President Shuntaro Furukawa made no bones about the fact there’ll be an impact on development schedules:

“As for game development work being done remotely, since there are indeed big limitations on what can be done from home, we do think this will have a large impact. Nintendo has development partners and development offices not just in Japan, but all over the world. The first locations to be affected were the offices in Europe and America, where working from home started early. Then our offices in Japan also switched to working from home. In the case of Japan, this had a major impact on development because we did not already have a remote development environment in place. But even so, we are gradually gaining experience in assessing what can and cannot be done remotely, and in determining how much progress we can make on the work we are able to do from home. Please be aware that the impact on game development in terms of both hardware and software may potentially increase as the amount of time spent working remotely increases.”

We’re sure Nintendo aren’t alone in having to be a little more flexible with their release schedules over the coming months, so President Furukawa’s candour is welcome. Here’s hoping the threat from coronavirus dies down soon so we can get back to some semblance of normality (and Metroid Prime 4 doesn’t get delayed until 2030).

Source: Nintendo