"The Mario and Zelda audience has historically been a younger audience"
I think what he means by "younger audience" is the "really friggin' big seller audience" since Mario and Zelda games always seem to sell millions more copies than almost any other series.

The guy just wants the Hobbit to sell well.
"yes the Hobbit and Lord of the Rings were originally written for children back in the mid 20th century,"
The Hobbit, to a degree, yes, but Lord of the Rings was most definetly *not* written for children. The Hobbit was supposed to be a nice little fairy tail for kids to read (maybe not real young kids, but Tolkien wasn't aiming at specifically adults), but in a letter written to someone asking to him to write a story about the Necromancer, Tolkien replied such a story would be much too dark for children. Well, LotR IS abotu that Necromancer, Sauron. It also contains a LOT of things that little kids would not understand- I first read the book in 4th grade and didn't understand an ounce of it. I do know, 5 years later, but LotR was not written for just kids. Besides, towards the end the book starts getting written in a very old English way- a little kid could spend hours wading through words upon words without knowing what most of them meant. LotR is a lot darker than the Hobbit (which has a sense of darkness all it's own).