With the sequel to Fantastic Beasts arriving in cinemas worldwide on 16th November, there’s no better time to talk about the secret history of the Harry Potter video game series. In a new Did You Know Gaming video, independent game researcher Liam Robertson takes a look at Nintendo’s failed Harry Potter pitch during the N64 era.
Prior to J.K Rowling’s franchise becoming a global phenomenon in 1999, Nintendo of America’s management decided it wanted to get the jump on developing the popular book series into video games. This followed the success of Rare’s GoldenEye 007 game in 1997 – which was based on the James Bond license. Although Nintendo’s headquarters in Japan had the final say, its American branch assigned Nintendo Software Technology Corporation (a studio located just down the road in Redmond, Washington) to work on ideas for Harry Potter games.
Of course, in order to gain an understanding of the wizarding world, the team responsible for coming up with these ideas were required to read every entry in the Harry Potter book series from cover to cover. At the time, NST was also busy developing multiple other titles. Eventually, it had two teams split off – with one working on a pitch for a Harry Potter game based on the main adventures and a separate team focusing on the fictional sport of Quidditch. Both of these titles were targeting a Nintendo 64 release. Full prototypes never saw the light of day, but there were art animations and mock 3D demos created. Only a few pitch documents and concepts still exist.
In the end, Nintendo made demands for exclusive rights to the franchise and talks with J.K. Rowling’s reps broke down. Ultimately, the license went to Warner Bros. and Electronic Arts in order to reach the widest audience possible. Noticeably, the platform Nintendo had originally pitched its own ideas for never actually got a Harry Potter game.
Take a look at the full story in the above video and tell us if you would have liked a Harry Potter game on the Nintendo 64.
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Campo Santo’s award-winning 2016 title Firewatch was revealed for the Nintendo Switch earlier this year in April and has since gone missing. When it was originally announced, it was said to be arriving at some point in the near future. With 2018 nearly over, it’s left us wondering if it will still show up before the end of the year.
According to Campo Santo co-founder Jake Rodkin, the game is “very close” to release. Rodkin delivered this information in a reply to a Twitter user asking about the availability of the game on the Switch. This followed his original tweet about how “ridiculously nice” the Switch version of the game looked. Here’s the initial tweet and latest screenshots:
If you haven’t heard about Firewatch before, it’s a traditional ‘walking simulator’ mixed with a linear narrative and set in Shoshone National Forest located in the US. You take on the role of Henry who is a fire lookout. Being in complete isolation, the only person Henry has contact with is his supervisor Delilah via radio communication. Take a look at the game’s original 2016 trailer below:
Have you experienced this indie hit previously? Are you a fan of story-driven walking sims? Tell us in the comments.
Paul Davies is a game design consultant, editorial manager and writer who has been working in the UK games industry since the early ’90s. During his career, he has edited best-selling publications such as Nintendo Magazine System and Computer & Video Games, and has contributed to countless other sites and magazines. In this special one-off piece to celebrate the upcoming release of Let’s Go Pikachu and Let’s Go Eevee on Nintendo Switch, Paul reminisces about his discovery of Pokémon at a time when the craze had yet to leave the shores of its native Japan…
1995 through to 1999 was something of a whirlwind period for me, as a direct result of how gaming was evolving, let’s say. So much happened inside those few short years, but one thing I’ve seen that has endured beyond reasonable expectation has been this peculiar thing called Pokémon. You see, I unknowingly smuggled the first news of Pokémon – or Pocket Monsters as it was known back then – into the UK after visiting Japan in November of 1995. I’d been on a press trip to cover the Nintendo-hosted Shoshinkai show, during which shiny new Nintendo 64 (or Ultra 64, if you prefer) was officially revealed.
Of course, most of the attention was on that amazing new console – who could ignore Super Mario 64, and the rest of that early line-up? Nintendo 64 utterly dominated the December issue of Computer & Video Games magazine, which I was editing at the time. However, amid the press materials – which in those days comprised of 35mm transparencies and high-quality photographs to scan – were a few images of the Game Boy title Pocket Monsters, with two versions: Red and Green. Our deputy editor, Tom Guise, quite liked the idea of this unusual game that featured little creatures that could be nurtured and trained for battle. We ran the smallest of news pieces, largely to keep Tom happy (quiet) as much as anything else. He had a hunch. We believed in those.
All went quiet on the Pocket Monsters front for roughly a year. I returned to Japan to spend New Year with my eventual in-laws at the turn of 1997. Tamagotchi was the big thing then, and my wife and I queued for hours to collect our commemorative gold and silver editions, much to her parents’ bemusement. However, also emerging from stores were these small clusters of junior school kids clutching their battered monochrome Game Boys, sporting Pikachu winter hats while assorted ‘Pocke-mon’ (the abbreviated form of Pocket Monsters, and not officially a name yet) mascots could be seen dangling from the bags of older children. Well, it was good to see that Tom’s thing was taking off.
While I was heading up C&VG, we had a guy based in Tokyo called Warren Harrod, who – as our ‘Man in Japan’ – would mostly visit publishers on the magazine’s behalf. We were also very fortunate that Warren had his ear close to the ground, so to speak, and his eyes fixed on everything that was wonderful and emerging in the world of anime and broader youth entertainment. Even he was surprised at the speed at which ‘Pocke-mon’ gained momentum in the wake of the first dedicated anime series, which started in Japan in the spring of 1997.
Now, C&VG (we liked to think) was the home of cool fighting games, mind-boggling racing games and basically anything that could be considered cool in the world of gaming – stuff like Virtua Fighter 3 or PaRappa the Rapper, that kind of thing. But here was Warren literally begging me to run a feature on the Pocket Monsters craze that had gripped the Japanese nation. It was no longer just the Game Boy thing; in addition to the anime which had brought Pocket Monsters vividly to life, there was the collectable card game and all manner of must-have merchandise. At this point, the team agreed that this could be a fun thing to read. After all, we’d run stories on Tamagotchi, which we’d then seen come to the UK, and a ‘Next Big Thing’ was always welcome. To add to this, Warren’s article was very sweet. He’d been allowed to interview his friends’ kids playing the CCG at a ‘Pocke-mon’ party of sorts.
I was fortunate to attend Nintendo’s Space World show in November 1997, where the N64 game that allowed kids to talk and play with Pikachu was first shown (known as Pikachu is Fine in Japan, but you might know it better as Hey You, Pikachu). The impact was utterly astounding. Crowds of bedazzled children and their parents gathered to watch the stage presentation. I remember that the café which overlooked the Space World show floor was also rammed with people with their faces pressed against the window, keen to confirm what friends had been telling them. The look on the kids’ faces when Pikachu responded to their words was unforgettable. This felt like real magic.
After spending another incredible New Year in Japan for 1998 – where Pikachu lunch-boxes, manga, mascots and train-station snacks were now the norm – it was clear that this ‘Pocke-mon’ thing had become a social revolution of sorts for Japanese kids. I had also learned that Pocket Monsters was to be released in the US that year under the name ‘Pokémon’. Having followed its progress for the past couple of years, I asked to speak with our Nintendo contacts during E3 1998, specifically about the series and how great it would be to make C&VG the home of Pokémon; after all, we had been pretty much the only UK magazine to give the series significant coverage and we considered ourselves to be reasonably well-versed in all things Pocket Monster.
No word of a lie, I had to explain to my Nintendo UK friends about why Pokémon was so cool, what it was all about, and the ways in which we could write about it in the magazine. For them, several months away from the US launch, Pokémon was probably just another name on a list of titles with a certain amount of allocated budget. I probably seemed a bit crazy.
I picked up both Pokémon Red and Blue as imports the day they were released. I went ahead and played this thing that had been bubbling under in the West while it raged in the East. Sure enough, the US went nuts for Pokémon, and at this stage the UK arm of Nintendo saw for themselves the potential. Sadly, C&VG didn’t get any official support, despite all of the groundwork we’d done pushing the game in the UK since 1995. Of course, the honour went to Nintendo Official Magazine, which was published by the same company as C&VG, EMAP Images. It was a real blow, but I do suspect that I had the guys at Nintendo UK to thank for putting my name forward for a mainstream TV interview on the subject, however.
This would’ve been in 1999, I guess. Fairly sure it was ITN, a breakfast news item. Basically, the questions were along the lines of ‘What is this Pokémon thing’ and ‘How long will it last?’ While I couldn’t have predicted 20 years of Pokémon passion outside of Japan, it was clear to me that it was here to stay. It wasn’t so much that it was breaking the banks of parents whose kids had gotten involved. Mainly, it was obvious that the likes of Pikachu, the mysterious Mew and darling Togepi had found their way into our hearts.
I’ll confess to listening to Japanese Pokémon songs on my way into work. I spent an entire holiday beside my wife with my face stuck in Pokémon Yellow. I had this awesome Pokémon Center Pikachu rucksack that I proudly paraded on the London underground. At work, I replaced all of my Mac alerts with Pikachu wav files – my email alert was literally ‘Pikapikpika’, which must have driven my co-workers crazy. I was a fool for Pokémon for a long while, but I loved it. Though I can’t excuse such behaviour at the age I am now (it was barely acceptable then), I now have my own little boy who tells me all about this thing that he’s discovered, and how cool it is, and please can he have it for Christmas.
The endless supply of shoot ’em up releases on Nintendo Switch continues. Degica and Spacewave Software have announced Rival Megagun will be released later this month on 29th November. The title was first confirmed for the Switch and multiple other platforms earlier this year in April.
The game puts a competitive twist on the classic genre, with two opponents facing off against each other in local split-screen or the online match-making mode. Apart from multiplayer, the standout feature is the ability to transform into a “Mega Gunship” and invade your opponent’s screen to knock them out. If multiplayer doesn’t particularly interest you, there’s also a single-player arcade mode and plenty of unlockable gear and weapons to help you customise your ship.
Do you think you would enjoy a competitive split-screen SHMUP? Tell us below.
One of the standout indie releases this year has been The Messenger – developed by Sabotage and published by Devolver Digital. Released in August on the Switch eShop, the 2D side-scroller draws inspiration from the original Ninja Gaiden game and enhances the experience with elements of 8-bit and 16-bit time travel.
If you have managed to complete this challenging title, you’ll be pleased to hear additional content is on the way – with Sabotage confirming its QOL update including “new mystery” and a New Game Plus mode. Below are the official details:
As noted in the tweet, there’s no exact release date for this update, but it’s expected to be ready at some point this month.
Will you be returning to the cursed world of The Messenger when this update is released? Tell us in the comments below.
It’s evident indie games are selling well on the Nintendo Switch with ongoing reports of successful sales, but why exactly do these games continue to perform so well on this particular platform? At PAX Australia in October, a bunch of indie developers got together for a special panel in an attempt to shed some light on this subject.
Ash Ringrose from SMG Studios said Death Squared sells more per day on Switch than it does over the course of an entire week on Steam, and this is still happening after 400 days. He went as far as saying the game sold “really badly” on other platforms when compared to Switch sales data. His theory is it’s not just about simply releasing any old game, it’s about providing this audience with quality experiences:
It’s not just put it on Switch and you’ve got an instant hit. I think the audience now still wants a good game. I think for us we got in quite early, we were quite lucky. But even the sales now we’re quite happy with, so it’s quite a healthy platform if you’re quite noisy about your game as well.
Henrik Pettersson from The Voxel Agents – the developer behind The Gardens Between – credited the success of indies partly to Nintendo. 60 percent of sales for this particular game have been on Switch so far, with Pettersson explaining:
I think I attribute that a bit to Nintendo’s help in terms of promoting the game and also that this new platform that people are really engaging in.
Matthew Rowland from League of Geeks said Armello during its short time on Switch didn’t really have any comparable sales data but did note how the Switch audience was more open to different types of games than users of other platforms:
Certainly the audience for the Switch for Armello seems more amenable to that kind of game than PlayStation or Xbox as just like a benefit there tonally there, I think.
Harmonious Games’ Joe Park said the success of Putty Pals on Switch was because of the local co-op in the game, which clearly didn’t appeal to the PC market. In the first day on the Switch, the game outsold the previous eight months on PC:
I think that’s also because our game was a local co-op game as well, which don’t do well on PC, which we kind of found out the hard way.
Why do you think indie games have been so successful on the Switch? Are you glad to hear users are lapping up these types of experiences? Tell us in the comments below.
To commemorate Ash Ketchum and Pikachu travelling together for more than 20 years in the Pokémon television series, The Pokémon Company is running a limited time event where you can redeem a total of five Pikachu in Ultra Sun and Ultra Moon. These distributions match the ones from last year (minus the Kanto and Johto regions) and can be claimed in Japan, America and Europe.
Each Pikachu is wearing a different hat matching what Ash wore in each of the respective regions in the television series. In addition to the unique hats, each Pikachu has different moves. To add five of these electric rodents to your party, simply follow the steps below and input the passwords. This limited time event runs until 30th November.
Open your Pokémon Ultra Sun or Pokémon Ultra Moon game.
Select Mystery Gift on the main menu.
Select Receive Gift.
Select Get with Code/Password, then Yes, then Yes again to connect to the internet.
Enter one of the passwords listed below.
Watch as Pikachu arrives in your game.
Speak to the delivery person in any Pokémon Center to receive your Pikachu.
Repeat steps 2–8 to receive the other Pikachu.
Be sure to save your game.
Hoenn Cap – LETSGOPIKACHU06 Sinnoh Cap – LETSGOPIKACHU09 Unova Cap – 13LETSGOPIKACHU Kalos Cap – LETS17GOPIKACHU Alola Cap – LETSGO19PIKACHU
Do you still play Pokémon games on your 3DS? Or are you more excited about Pokémon Let’s Go? Tell us below.
In the latest episode of Nintendo Minute, hosts Kit and Krysta went hands-on with the upcoming Bandai Namco release Katamari Damacy Reroll.
For anyone who hasn’t played this weird and wonderful game, there’s no need to worry, as a demo for the Switch version will apparently arrive on 7th December – the same day as the title’s launch. This also happens to be the release date for Super Smash Bros. Ultimate. Below is the full rundown:
There will be a demo for the game that will release on Dec. 7. That’s also the day the game comes out for Nintendo Switch. If you want to get rolled, and trust us you do, you should definitely check it out.
Bandai Namco reconfirmed the game’s release date via its official Twitter account:
Katamari Damacy Reroll was first announced for the Switch back in September during a Nintendo Direct and is a slightly enhanced version of the PlayStation 2 original which first arrived in 2004.
The story is about the king of the cosmos who makes a prince travel to earth to roll up every object in sight with his magical “katamari” ball. The Switch version includes high definition visuals, special gyro controls and a two-player mode.
Will you be downloading the Katamari Damacy demo? Are you excited to play Katamari on Switch? Tell us below.
Once again, we find ourselves at the end of another week, and now it’s time for Team Nintendo Life to gather ’round and discuss all of the lovely games we’ll be playing over the next couple of days. We’ve got demon slaying, RPG beating, and even some real-life Pokémon catching on the agenda this week, so make sure to give our entries a read and then provide your own via the comments and poll below. Enjoy!
Ryan Craddock, staff writer
Aside from spending every waking moment making my way through a game for review purposes, I’ll likely actually give most of my gaming time this weekend to Pokémon GO. Today (Saturday) sees another Community Day taking place – actually starting at the very moment this article goes live in my region – and I’ll be heading out to snag myself a whole lot of Cyndaquil (and hopefully several shinies, too).
I hadn’t played GO for over a year or more but, over the last month or two, I’ve found myself completely hooked once again. The last Community Day was a great experience and seeing so many people wandering around town and bonding over the same game in real life was great to behold. Hopefully the weather’s actually nice enough for everyone to head outside again!
Liam Doolan, news reporter
I’ve been busy slaying demons throughout the week in Diablo III: Eternal Collection, so I guess I’ll continue on with that this weekend. As I’ve already played the game a few times elsewhere prior to the Switch release, I’m pacing myself a little more on this third run. I’m also thoroughly enjoying raising the dead with the Necromancer class, which I previously hadn’t tried out until now.
As for my free-to-play fix, I intend to spend some time with Brawlhalla before Super Smash Bros. Ultimate arrives. From what I have played so far, it’s not bad. The addition of Ubisoft’s iconic mascot Rayman makes it even better (provided you can cough up the required amount of in-game gold). Last of all, I’ll be taking a look at Night Slashers, which is the latest release in the Johnny Turbo collection. It sort of has a Final Fight vibe about it, except set in a world filled with monsters and the undead. There are apparently even bonus games including whack-a-zombie and undead bowling – it sounds thrilling!
Dom Reseigh-Lincoln, reviewer
This weekend I’ll be getting my cartoon RPG on with the colourful sci-fi escapade that is Crashlands on Nintendo Switch. I’ll also be testing out Carnival Games (don’t laugh) with the help of my eldest, so expect some lovely words from me on both of those next week on Nintendo Life.
I’ve also got a hankering for some Spyro, what with the Reignited Trilogy round the corner, so I think it’s time to fire up the GameCube for some classic dragon action.
Austin Voigt, contributing writer
I’m pretty sure I’m going to lose my status as a legitimate Nintendo fan for this – but I’m going to be purchasing Splatoon 2 for the first time, and will probably become addicted and play it the entire weekend. I’ve obviously played often with friends, but never owned it myself. As sad as it is, I tend to avoid most competitive shooter games, partially because they give me some anxiety (I live in the US – enough said). However, Splatoon is probably the most whimsical and innocent shooter game you could play – and my friends have convinced me that it’s time to bite the bullet (or, ink) and get into this game. So this is my goal for the weekend. Stop judging me – I’m working on it, people!
Gonçalo Lopes, contributing writer
Remember, remember the month of November whose insane release schedule has caught up to my weekend plans – and I believe it will break both my wallet and some sort of personal record for the number of monthly Switch pick-ups. I spent most of the week doing Squad Stories on Valkyria Chronicles 4 (including some swimsuit DLC shenanigans) so I hope to actually progress the main campaign this weekend. Maybe, just maybe complete all the campaigns in Starlink: Battle for Atlas. I have pacified two of the three sectors on the system and am in a very favourable position to assault the third, hardest one.
Yet this week it was on the eShop that the unexpected goods showed up. I will be taking on sporadic doses of Road Redemption, Saboteur!, Rogue Legacy, The Bug Butcher, Trine and the TRON-tastic Battlezone Gold Edition. Classic Mode on that last one is a particularly zen experience… at least until you realise there are online leaderboards and everyone is Billy Mitchell.
My game of the week is obviously Astebreed. You might wonder why I would be so excited to spend a weekend with a game that is three years old, but it is not a very exciting mystery to solve: I had no clue the game existed before being announced on the Switch. Kindly pass me the giant metal sword.
Jon Cousins, Japan correspondent
This weekend I’m going to take a trip down memory lane. First on my list is the glorious homage to all things Game Boy (and my second favourite type of cephalopod) Save me Mr Tako! I’ve been following the game for a couple of years and it’s great to finally see it out in the wild. Second, while I wait for Metroid to release on Nintendo Switch Online, I’m going to dabble in the rest of the franchise again to get back in the groove, and giddily anticipate news of the fourth instalment. You know Christmas is coming up, Nintendo? If we have to wait till E3 that would just be mean!
Which games are you playing this weekend? (64 votes)
