The informative The Game Business has managed to catch up with Star Fox developer Velan Studios to discuss game development and that all-important relationship with Nintendo. Guha and Karthik Bala said that they have consistently been at the launch of every Nintendo system since the Game Boy Color and that they simply made good games that Nintendo liked therefore leading to collaborations. The first time Velan Studios collaborated with Nintendo was with 2015’s Skylanders Superchargers and they have had a healthy relationship since. Here’s what they told The Game Business:
“We’ve had a longstanding collaboration with Nintendo,” Guha explains. “Our first game with Nintendo was Spider-Man for Game Boy Color in 1998. From there, we’ve been on the launch of every system.
“People ask me, how you build relationships throughout the industry? “You make promises and you keep them, and you try to exceed expectations. If you do this consistently over time, you build trust, you build relationships, and you build interesting opportunities to collaborate. Over the course of 35-plus years, that’s what we’ve tried to do. Star Fox is just the latest output of that.”
Karthik added: “The Nintendo partnership is a very special and unique one, and the bar is really high in terms of what we need to make. But that’s always been the case. Even when we were third-party with Nintendo. And it helped us back then. We made really good games that Nintendo liked, which gave us the opening to have conversations.”
The Balas first worked with Nintendo IP at Vicarious Visions, via a collaboration with 2015’s Skylanders Superchargers.
“That was a big moment for us, because we finally were able to integrate Nintendo characters into one of our games,” Karthik says.