Tuesday News

Well, it's official; Final Fantasy IX is a hit in Japan. The game sold 2.6 million copies on release and another 200,000 copies should ship in just a few days. Square is confident they will break 3 million copies soon and have announced that the Final Fantasy series at that time will be reaching 30 million copies worldwide in total sales.

Ever wonder where the name Final Fantasy comes from, since none of the Final Fantasy games have been too terribly 'final?' According to one story, Square was facing bankruptcy and the game we know as Final Fantasy was their last ditch effort. When it was released in Japan, the original Final Fantasy for the NES sold over 520,000, an astounding number for that time.

Originally planned to release as two seperate games, one a solitary player, the other supporting multiplayer, Ripcord Games has decided to merge Legend of the Blademasters and Quest of the Blademasters into one game, titled Legend of the Blademasters. The game will coincide with the launch of Sega.net, Sega's online forum, and be available for both PC and the Dreamcast. Legend of the Blademasters will ship on September 27th and is Ripcord's first Sega title as a third party publisher for Sega.net.

EverQuest is getting a new expansion pack this December. The Scars of Velious will feature a new continent and brand new monsters. The pack will also have updated character graphics.

Well, an answer has finally come forth from Mr. Kojima himself regarding a re-release of Snatcher/Policenauts. This is a letter posted on Konami of America's site:

Hello Folks,
I would like to thank you all about your support for Konami and desire for great games, especially about Snatcher and Policenauts. During that time, I have been talking to people in Japan and have been in contact with Mr. Kojima as well about doing an English version of both these games for possibly PS or another hardware. Now here is the disappointing news.

Mr. Kojima has stated that he will not do a conversion of the games himself, since he is working with new technology and wants to exploit that as much as he can (Ie. he is very busy working on MGS 2 Sons of Liberty as well being the executive producer over Z.O.E.). Unfortunately, he does not have time to look over a conversion of the game.

Next, he has not been happy with past conversions of his games onto other platforms and will not allow another development group (even a different Konami internal group) to take his product and covert or localize them without his direct supervision, which as stated above, he does not have time to do.

So, I am sorry to have to announce, that Policenauts and Snatcher will not be ported over any time soon, if ever, unless Mr. Kojima changes his mind, though at this point it does not seem that he will.

His vision at this time is to push the envelope on the current platforms to see what can be done next. You can get this from an interview in some magazines where he states that he expected more from the PS2.

Thanks for your support and please look forward to other Kojima titles as well as other titles from Konami.

We do listen to your comments and requests and we did try to bring these games over here. Don't give up on asking us to bring out your favorite Konami games from Japan just because this one did not fall through.

Thanks again,

Ken 'tako' Ogasawara
Producer
Konami of America

This is definitely a sad state of affairs, especially since so many people have never experienced either of these games, myself included.

Source(s):

Magic Box GameFan Silicon Magazine

Date Updated:
July 11th, 2000

Time Updated:
2:48 PM

Sumire Kanzaki