Life Gets Interesting
by Eric Marlow
For a number of months now I have had a secret. No, not that kind of secret! One that I WANTED to tell you but I couldn’t. Since February of this year our studio here in the Philippines has been in talks with Kuju Entertainment. Kuju for those of you who don’t know is a very large well-respected developer of games. Kuju’s group includes six studios over two continents. Some of their more notable products include making the EyeToy and Sing Star products, Battalion Wars 2, Geometry Wars, and the soon-to-be-released House of the Dead and Rock Revolution. Cool stuff.
What kinds of talks you ask? Acquisition talks. Life just got a lot more interesting as a result.
Late last year after our studio completed its first arcade game, we brokered a deal to convert the game to the Nintendo Wii platform. This was exciting for a number of reasons - the use of the new Wiimote controllers being one of them. Kuju’s US studio was to help us publish it with Ubisoft. Porting the game to a completely different platform was not a trivial task, especially when we did it in six languages for a global release. But we were able to complete it in record time. The game is called Circus Games, and was release in October. Big relief!
But in the process Kuju discovered they liked working with us, and they found value in keeping the relationship alive for subsequent products. As a result Kuju spoke with our former parent Leisure and Allied Industries (same parent of Timezone) and worked out a deal to transition the studio to Kuju. As of October 20, 2008 we are now officially part of the Kuju family of studios.
Our new studio name is Kuju Manila. Our goal will be to leverage our talents here in the Philippines and work with our brothers and sisters in the other Kuju studios around the world. The model in the games industry today is one of “distributed development”, and our studio here is at the forefront of this style of management here in the Philippines. In practical terms this means we work together on large projects, but we still do much of our own game development. We do not outsource. We program and manage much of the work ourselves.
I am very proud of the new Kuju Manila team and their accomplishments. The acquisition deal took a long time – far longer than anyone would have expected. Their patience has paid off. Not only have their shipped their first consumer title, they have already started work on several more games. It’s expected that our studio will be growing over the coming months, and it’s all attributable to the team’s hard work and dedication. Thanks guys!
Eric Marlow is General Manager and Head of Studio for Kuju Manila, Inc. Please feel free to drop an email with any questions you may have. Space permitting we’ll answer your questions in upcoming editions. You can reach him at theinsider@octobereighty.com. Game On!
