BurgerTime World Tour's evolution

MonkeyPaw Games' mission is to bridge the cultural gap between east and west, ensuring gamers get to play gems which would otherwise remain untouched by risk-averse publishers. The company's latest game, an update of 1982 arcade game BurgerTime developed by Frozen Codebase, is out today on XBLA, PSN and WiiWare. We caught up with former Hudson Entertainment president and current MonkeyPaw president John Greiner to discuss the challenges involved in bringing the best of Japan to these shores.

Is there a market for Eastern eccentricity in the West?
So much of the video game business in Japan has gone to different platforms that aren’t so easily recognisable, now. The Japanese might have moved away from the traditional video game platform, but they’re still making good games, and there’s still a lot of ingenuity out there - and a lot of new things that are happening that Westerners don’t see as much. It’s hard to translate that and to bring that over to the West.

Even on PlayStation and Wii, [very few Western publishers] understand the potential of those titles. [Most] don’t think that anything marginally deep or culturally heavy could be translated, and even if it were translated well, they don’t think it would sell well. That’s where we come in. We’re independent and we can see some unique titles that really should have a Western showing and will have a Western audience.

MonkeyPaw president John Greiner

How do you identify the games that have that potential?
It’s quite strange for me being an American in a company from Japan, but that’s the reason I’m over here. I don’t think many companies would do this - there’s not many Westerners that are dedicated enough to the Japanese market to be here and to be constantly interacting with it, seeing what’s good and digging around for titles that are lost but still have potential.

If you want to learn a language you have to be in that country and that culture, and gaming is a kind of language where you need to be submerged in that society and you need to see that over time, otherwise you really don’t have a chance to make a business out of it. You could get lucky once in a while, but you’re not going to create a continuous flow of products by coming over on a business trip once in a blue moon or whatever.