Marvelous Entertainment is launching a new "World Game Parade" label for WiiWare in Japan, bringing over indie games from Western developers which might not otherwise have seen the inside of the Japanese Wii Shop. The release dates haven't been announced yet, but the first four games have been named and listed on a promotional site with their country of origin indicated.
The names are being changed for localisation purposes, so you can try to guess what the original name of the game is — or cheat and just click on the links:
Zombie in Wonderland (Spain)
Bit Man!! (Austria)
Rakugaki ★ Hero (Denmark)
Katamuki Spirits (France)
We'd like to credit developer Bplus with letting us know about this exciting opportunity for indie developers to get their games published in Japan — no doubt a daunting prospect if they had to do it on their own. Marvelous Entertainment and Bplus had the following to say about this new project:
Yasuhiro Wada, chief creative officer of Marvelous: We really believe in creativity at Marvelous and when we saw Bit Man!! we definitely thought that this was the kind of unique and original title you couldn't find in Japan, but could still be enjoyed by Japanese users too. So, we had to add it into our World Game Parade line-up. Bplus did a great job at localizing it and we are really looking forward to hearing the feedback from the users here.
Bernd Geiblinger, CEO and Art Director of Bplus: When we were invited by Wada-san to take part in the World Game Parade, we couldn't have been more excited. Marvelous offers us the fantastic opportunity to tap into the Japanese market that is home to players constantly longing for new and creative concepts. The team at Marvelous shows a tremendous support for our ideas and we cannot wait to release Bit Man!! and other future projects together with them.
We heartily congratulate all the developers taking part in the World Game Parade on getting this exposure and hope that more indie games will be brought Eastward by Marvelous in the future — not only to WiiWare, but DSiWare as well.
You can read the full press release from Bplus at their website, and you can expect a full interview soon with questions about how they became part of the World Game Parade, what changes have been made to Bit Man!! for the Japanese market and hopefully some news about other projects.
Comments 11
That's a great concept. I hope it does well for them. Those little characters in the parade are so cutey cute.
Hopefully it's something other publishers will imitate. It would be a shame to miss out on some great games due to lack of a publisher presence in another territory.
Maybe Marvelous could bring Discipline to the rest of us? Please?
This is an awesome move by Marvelous Entertainment. Hopefully both they and the developers will benefit from it.
And I hope they do the reverse as well and bring JPN titles over. Also, Max and the Magic Marker for 500!
so does this mean we'll see max and mm, and that zombie game over here sometime as well then?
Marvelous deserve a medal, both for this and their commitment to bring Japanese stuff to the West. I love them...
That's really nice indeed! (I'm Equilibrio's author)
@Kristof: Pretty exciting stuff, you must be pleased!
And I hope they do the reverse as well and bring JPN titles over.
Man, with stuff like Muscle March and Tomena Sanner making it out on their own what are we really missing out on besides Pole?
so does this mean we'll see max and mm, and that zombie game over here sometime as well then?
Both games were confirmed for over here long time ago. Max was just recently confirmed for March.
Well, Discipline is a big title that comes to mind and happens to be from Marvelous. It's very text-heavy so it will take some work to localise and it's a bit strange so Marvelous themselves didn't sound that keen to do it. I'm hoping someone like Gamebridge will step-up to the plate!
There's also a raft of DSiWare that's only available in Japan; whilst the Nintendo stuff is largely guaranteed the same cannot be said of games from G-Mode, Tom Create or Genterprise and they're doing some interesting budget titles that people have expressed interest in.
Pretty exciting indeed. Japanese market is very closed. So I'm pleased to release a game there. Another step for me. Yeaahhhhhhh.
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