One of the highlight announcements at Nintendo’s E3 2011  press briefing was the revelation that a new Smash Bros. title was being planned for Wii U. Excitement quickly waned when Nintendo said it had no further details to share. As it turns out, we may be in for a long wait. Not only is Project Sora still assembling a development team, due to outstanding commitments it hasn’t even begun thinking about the title yet, says project lead Masahiro Sakurai in a recent Famitsu column:

Right now, we’re devoting all our manpower to working on Kid Icarus. We’ve got no plans whatsoever — we’ve got two new games out in the open when there’s no extra time to work with them at all. It makes me cringe, and I’m not sure it’s the smartest thing to make gamers wait for several years, but the early announcement was made chiefly in order to attract new team members.

Sakurai also chimed in on the decision to embrace cross-platform play between Wii U and 3DS:

“If we went solely for the Wii U the HD graphics would really bump up the visual effects, but then we’d be stuck in another arms race. If we made this game another extension over previous one, we’d have to cut out the new things we could possibly do on the 3DS hardware and compete with ourselves again over the size of the character roster and the amount of gameplay we can put it. ”

“It wouldn’t be a fruitful competition, but doing something completely new would be difficult for many reasons, not least of which that the gamers may not be satisfied with it. That’s why we decided to think about ways to link the personal connection one has with his portable system to the gather-around-and-play aspect of console systems.”

Thanks, 1UP.

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