Golf Story has proven to be one of the Switch's big indie hits of 2017, but incredibly we could have experienced the game a lot sooner, had fate not intervened.

Sidebar Games' Andrew Newey - who constitutes 50 percent of the game's development team - has been speaking to Red Bull Games about the creation of the game, and reveals that it was originally supposed to come out on the Wii U, and on a much smaller scale:

We're two people in Queensland, Australia. We worked on some smaller games on and off for about eight years, and eventually decided to try and make a console game, so we signed up to become Wii U developers near the end of the Wii U. It was just a small game at first, since we wanted to get something out before the Wii U ended, but it kind of got out of hand, with too many ideas. We managed to move it over to Switch thanks to Nintendo being interested in it.

Unsurprisingly, Newey admits that Nintendo's past titles were a big influence on Golf Story:

Mario Golf was a favourite of mine. I like pretty much all kind of golf games so there are some ideas from other things, too. For example, the Tidy Park golf course is based on some old NES golf games that play horizontally. There's a lot of that kind of stuff that probably only seems cool to me. I also got a lot of good quotes for the punks and old people from my time on golf courses and watching golf.

Newey also explains why the Switch was chosen as the target platform:

We thought the game would play best on a plane so that was the main inspiration. We were also personally excited about the Switch so it was our main choice to release on, and we thought it would be fun to do some stuff with the HD rumble.

Nintendo were a big help too, he reveals:

Being a new and unknown game, we thought we would be left to do most of it on our own, but they were actually very involved and helped us out a lot with releasing it.

Finally, Newey states that Golf Story is likely to remain a Switch exclusive for the foreseeable future, and that the studio's next game will totally unrelated:

We want to make something different for our next game. We haven't thought much about ports, we're mainly focused on a new game and finishing the Japanese version of Golf Story.

Are you still enjoying this epic sports RPG? Let us know with a comment.

[source redbull.com]