Nintendo's Wiiware downloadable games service launched this week, with the undoubted highlight being LostWinds from Brit developer Frontier. I had a chat with Frontier boss David "Elite" Braben and asked him about the game and the Wii in general.

Why Wiiware and not Live/PSN?

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

So the game was designed from day 1 for the Wii, the whole point of the game is to allow the player to use the Wii control system in a coherent, intuitive, satisfying way with no compromises.

As time went by and we saw the games available for Wii, we felt increasingly certain that LostWinds would satisfy a pent up demand from Wii owners for something innovative that delivers deep, involving, Wii-specific gameplay in a beautiful skin.

When we heard about the service and its aims from Nintendo, it seemed to us like LostWinds was exactly the kind of game they were trying to encourage with WiiWare, something specific for Wii that innovated around the controller.

So LostWinds on WiiWare came about through the combination of the right idea being in the right place at the right time - the opportunity to be a launch title was too good to miss, and the team worked hard to make it happen. We have no aversion to PSN or XBLA, but we have other game ideas that are probably better suited to those consoles and their audiences

Is the Wii audience ready to download games?

We know Nintendo certainly believed the Wii would be an on-line machine from its first inception, and also that a significant proportion of Wii's are online - for example Nintendo wouldn't bother with their recent BBC iPlayer deal unless there was an online audience for it. I also don't see there is any reason to think that Wii owners have an aversion to on-line commerce - for example most of the games they play on their Wii were probably bought from play.com or amazon, they probably use iTunes, etc. We clearly believe they are ready to download, and we hope that LostWinds is the game that will entice them to make that step; it's a fresh, good fun, high quality Wii game in its own right, and on top of that you can get it immediately downloaded onto your Wii console from the Wii Shop Channel from the comfort of your living room.

Lostwinds has more original features than most full-price Wii titles - does this prove that small teams are the only way to bring fresh gaming ideas?

Thank you! I think the real issues are who takes the risk and how big that risk is. The great thing about digital distribution is that we can take the risk of development ourselves as there are no expensive discs to manufacture, ship and stock, so in that sense WiiWare made it easier for LostWinds to come out because we believed that it was a great idea, and a publisher may have been more skeptical about it.

WiiWare and its like may perhaps lead the process - and will certainly be the home of the riskier ideas - but there no reason why disc-based games should not also innovate, it all comes down to the judgment of the people assessing how successful the new idea will be once implemented.

Is this a return to the 8bit days of big ideas/small teams?

It is amazing the nostalgic image people have these days of the 8 bit era! Many of the games around then were rubbish - but time has allowed them to fade into obscurity. We see something similar with pop music - looking back a few decades, you only remember the good music you enjoyed. Having said that, though, development teams were much smaller, so in a sense there is a throwback, but in those days a team of ten people or so was typically a huge, risky, publisher-funded project. Now that developers can afford this we will see a lot more innovation with smaller teams like this, I think, which is quite a contrast to the 80s.

Do you expect Lostwinds to appeal to the new gaming audience attracted to the Wii?

Yes, even though the truth is we wrote the game for ourselves, not some imagined audience. The genesis of LostWinds through Frontier's 'Game of the Week' forum (where all are free to put forward and debate game ideas, and where it gained a number of very strong advocates) means that we knew LostWinds was definitely appealing to the Nintendo 'hard core' (if we can be forgiven for describing them as such), as we have many representatives of this 'hard core' here at Frontier! But equally our experience with successful mainstream games like Thrillville and RollerCoaster Tycoon 3 before it has taught us that quality is key, along with accessibility. Great games are equally difficult to make for either 'hardcore' or 'casual' audience, needing the same level of love and dedication, so we try to focus on creating high quality gameplay and making it accessible, and by doing that we believe we will please a lot of people.

If successful can you see Frontier creating further Wiiware games?

Absolutely - the reaction to LostWinds has already been amazing, and we certainly are not short of good ideas.