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From an interview about Super Mario 3D Land with Koichi Hayashida, its director:

Was it just the earthquake that made you lose track of that, or was it something that you'd felt that you had slowly lost track of and then that moment, that insight, allowed you to regain that?
KH: So, maybe I should offer a little of background about my thinking about this entire process, instead of feelings. Mr. Miyamoto sends out New Year's cards which are always kind of interesting. One of the things that you can see in the cards that he sends out is that he's rather severe with himself about his enforcement about the need to find fun in everything. And that's something that's expressed even in his year-end cards. And I don't know that I fully understood this myself to the same depth, but as the team leader, I felt like it was important for me to make sure that everyone had good morale, and keep up our levels of fun and interest in making games. And, of course, I myself was interested in making games, and I've always thought it was fun, but I never really dwelled on the importance of why that fun made a difference to our work.
And so it was in that one moment, when my colleague gave me the answer that he got into this line of work simply because "making games is fun", that I was taken aback. I mean, his answer was so simple, and I thought to myself, "How can I convey this to the team? I really want to tell them all about this in a way that they understand." I think that's the moment when I had that realization of its importance.
So, you can try and convey this to people in a number of ways: You can tell them a very detailed story about how turning swimming into a kind of game is a really good example of why enjoying everything is important, but it still might not sink in for some people. And I certainly know that, because that was the case for me.

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You may recall Miyamoto mentioned at an investor meeting a while ago that swimming was a hobby of his. (I can't find the direct source, but there are countless articles about it.)

Finally, Endless Ocean 2 was released in late 2009 (in Japan); there hasn't been one since then. What if some swimming-esque game is coming up for Wii U?

This is pretty stupid, but I can't not share it.

My friend freaking loved Endless Ocean and its sequel to death. Only reason I didn't end up playing it is because of the backlog, but its on the list of "TO PLAY" titles.

Plus its so easy to mellow out when you play.......................

Blue World lost me early on with the whale attack. Super lame. Otherwise, they're neat concepts, and I like it when Nintendo takes chances.

EO2 has a story that isn't cheesy enough or normal enough to be exciting. It's just crappy.

I still liked it, but some of the early plot is really bad.

Endless ocean is one of the few good Nintendo games, EO2 is very good, I spent many hours on this game and loved even minute of it. I haven't played the first one yet but I have played EO2.

No swimming at E3. :(

Endless Ocean 1 is good, too. It's very open and there's not much story content. It's interesting in that the developers put in all kinds of easter eggs and secrets that are never mentioned or explained well in the game. Worth it for an EO2 fan, I'd think.

I didn't care for Everblue 2, but I think that's mostly because of the draw distance. Only very close fish appear, everything else is behind the blue fog.

Kickstarter, come to the rescue.