We know that LostWinds started as a "Game of the Week" idea at Frontier. What about this idea was so special that differentiates it from other ideas and made it become a WiiWare title? Finally, how did you become a launch title for WiiWare? Did Nintendo come to you or did you contact them about the title?

David Braben: Just to give some background on the Game of the Week forum at Frontier, it’s an internal discussion board that anyone in the company can use to post their own games ideas / thoughts, from a one liner to fully-fledged design document. This causes a great deal of debate, criticism and argument, with many improvements, problems being raised and solved -- we have likened the process to dangling a leg of lamb into a piranha-filled stream: the water boils for a while, but then whatever is left must be pretty tough.

The idea for LostWinds dates from the time that the Wii was first announced (when it was still called the Revolution), when we were brainstorming design ideas that made good use of the Wii controls -– it is one of many strong ideas we have built up over time, and it gathered a number of very enthusiastic internal advocates.

The LostWinds idea was all about the Wii’s controls; there was no pre-conception of how it would be delivered. The natural assumption is that it would be a disc-based game as WiiWare was not available then.

Fast forward to late 2007. Out of the blue, Nintendo invited us to a mysterious meeting in London, as it turned out, to explain their plans for WiiWare. We were delighted that it seemed as if their ideals for WiiWare were almost exactly fulfilled by LostWinds: allowing developers like us to create something innovative specifically for the Wii and, most importantly, its controller. Always trying to be prepared, we had taken a copy of the LostWinds concept document to the meeting. The timing for us was perfect -- we had some people coming free, having just finished ThrillVille: Off the Rails. The chance to shoot for being a launch title for WiiWare was too good to pass up. So we said, "Sounds great, and this is what we’d like to do.”

That was it –- it was due to the idea ultimately being in the right place at the right time.

Nintendo was scrupulously fair in the lead up to launch, and I can’t praise enough the efforts of their people in North America and Europe who worked very hard to get the service launched –- you’ll see a few of them are credited in LostWinds. We didn’t know if we were going to be a launch title until very close to the time, perhaps a week or so out. Obviously, it is what the team was working towards, and we felt we were hitting the right time window to be in with a chance, but it was a massive sense of relief and elation when we heard we had made it!