GameSpy: The Hardy Boyz are a popular tag team, but we're concerned that players may want to put their two favorites together in a match to make an original tag team. Do you take this into account, or is the game tailored towards the existing tag teams and their signature styles?
Shintaro Matsubara: The tag team matches are set up so that players can pick whatever wrestlers they want as a team. You set them up as a stable, and save that team. There's a new double team special move which you can assign to anyone, regardless of whether or not they're an existing tag team.
GameSpy: Last year you were able to import your own music into the Xbox 360 version of the game. Will this feature be included in any other versions?
Shintaro Matsubara: We're very excited about being able to announce that this year the custom soundtrack feature will be included in the PlayStation 3 version of the game, as well as on the Xbox 360. Now Sony owners will be able to rip their own music into the game.

GameSpy: Online gaming is huge these days. How important is online gaming to the franchise?
Shintaro Matsubara: I think with our game, one of the really exciting or unique aspects of the game is that it's not just fun to play, but also fun to watch, and fun to play together with people. Up until now, our game has been very popular with people who would get groups together, bring friends over, and play it in a big group, and maybe watch one guy take on another guy.

Bringing our game online has just expanded the number of people you have the opportunity to play against. It also gives you the opportunity to play multiplayer against real people at any time of the day. Bringing online gameplay to the Wii is only taking our game to another level, a huge feature for us that we're happy to offer.
GameSpy: How do you plan to overcome the hurdles that are part of the Wii's online experience, like friend codes and so on?
Shintaro Matsubara: As this is the first time we'll offer online play on the Wii, there are a lot of hurdles that we expect to still come up against in our development cycle. Where we are right now, we're planning to have the same online features on Wii that we have on the Xbox 360 and on the PS3. That's how we're pushing our development, and everything is there right now, but there may be some unforeseen things that come up over the course of development that prevent us from providing the entire experience, but we'll just have to wait and see.

But like you said, if you don't have someone's friend code, you can't play against someone else. And if you don't have the ranking, it doesn't look like you're really involved in online play. We're planning on accommodating all those things in the Wii's online experience.