A portion of an NWR interview with Bill Trinen...

NWR: Thank you for having us. Let’s get a general idea. How did the idea of StreetPass come about?

Bill: Well StreetPass originally actually dates back to the original Nintendogs on Nintendo DS. The idea for it came from Mr. Miyamoto’s experience as a dog owner. I don’t know if you’ve ever had a dog, I’m a dog owner myself and can verify that this is very true. When you have a dog and you take your dog on a walk you invariably encounter other dog owners and because of the fact that you both have dogs you generally stop and talk to one another and have a conversation with somebody or an encounter with somebody that otherwise you might not have. So, he wanted to try to find a way to replicate that dog walking experience in Nintendogs when they were working on the game and the result was what, at the time, was called Tag Mode, but essentially it served as a StreetPass connection in Nintendogs itself. Hideki Konno was the producer on that game and when he was working on the 3DS hardware he really wanted to take, what he thought, was a pretty unique feature and a unique way to connect players together and integrate that into the 3DS hardware itself. That was really where the 3DS StreetPass feature evolved from. In Japan in particular on DS Nintendogs was a pretty popular kind of game that leveraged that, but Dragon Quest IX is when it really took off and Konno-san, I think a little bit out of jealousy, wanted to one up what Dragon Quest IX had been able to achieve. So [he] integrated it into the Nintendo 3DS hardware.

NWR: Very nice. So do we expect StreetPass Weekend to be an annual thing or is there plans to incorporate this weekend multiple times during the year?

Bill: We haven’t really quite decided. We wanted to give it a shot this weekend and kind of see what we can do around it. We have a lot of ideas in terms of how we can continue to use Nintendo Zone for big events and promotional type activities. We’re also looking at the possibility of doing it not just on the National Scale but, as you mentioned, on an international scale, and so then we’d be looking at what are the right weekends that make sense for everyone globally, and how can we get people excited about StreetPass on a regular basis and still find some unique ways to use this functionality to allow you to fully connect with others in your local area or across the county or across the world.

NWR: Cool, so can we expect maybe more StreetPass Mii Plaza games in the future?

Bill: Well certainly even before the release of Warrior’s Way, and the other StreetPass games, we’ve had updates of Find Mii and we’ve continued to kind of update Puzzle Swap with new puzzles as well. The teams in Japan are constantly thinking of what they can do to take advantage of StreetPass. There isn’t anything else on the horizon right now for new StreetPsss games, but I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s somebody who’s thinking about it. Certainly I would like to see more because I’m still having a lot of fun with Warrior’s Way even though I’m on my second time through it at this point.