For those not in the know, visual novels are.well, novels that are visual. But then when you start a new game, all that energy witnessed in the intro suddenly takes a turn as you soon realise that Sugimura's plot is told in the form of a "sound novel," a type of game fairly similar to a visual novel. The game's action-packed opening cinematic sets this all up really well, with plenty of flashy stop-motion spy stuff and enough explosions to make Michael Bay blush. The game's plot takes place in the year 2060, and revolves around Sarah Fitzgerald, a bounty hunter who roams the crime-ridden Neo Tokyo with the goal of assassinating a notorious mafia boss known as the "Lord of the Holy Mountain". The staff of Flagship at a 2001 presentation Bounty Hunter Sarah was Flagship’s first and only original IP, with its big selling point being that its plot was written by the same scenario writer as Resident Evil 2, Noboru Sugimura, who had also left Capcom to be part of Flagship.
With funding from Capcom, Nintendo and Sega, Flagship would develop or assist with the development of games from huge franchises such as Resident Evil, Kirby and The Legend of Zelda, before sadly closing its doors in 2007. Published by Capcom, this Japanese-exclusive "sound novel" (more on that in a moment) was developed by Flagship, a fresh-faced independent studio founded by ex-Capcom developer Yoshiki Okamoto. In the indie games world, these two roles are often (but not always) filled by the same company or person.īounty Hunter Sarah: Holy Mountain no Teiō was released onto the Dreamcast and PlayStation on the 24th of May 2001. The distributor, on the other hand, deals primarily with ensuring the product is available for sale in as many appropriate places as possible. Usually the publisher will help with artwork, marketing, production, and various other tasks such as providing review copies to magazines and influencers. The role of a publisher is to, in short, take a game and turn it into a saleable product. That’s interesting – this might sound like a daft question, but what is the main difference between distributing and publishing a game?
We really started to ramp up our efforts this year, which is when we began publishing games in addition to just distributing them.
WAVE has a fairly long history, but the most recent incarnation stems back to 2015 which is when we started distributing games to UK based retailers. Norfolk, known for Alan Partridge, mustard.and now WAVE Game Studios! So, when was WAVE Game Studios established and what was the reasoning being the creation of the label? WAVE Game Studios: It’s our pleasure! WAVE is primarily made up of two brothers, Daniel and Nick. Before we begin, can you give us little bit of background about who makes up the team? DCJY: Hi, thanks for agreeing to talk to us about WAVE Game Studios.