Walk by almost any mall kiosk and you’ll find a retro Atari t-shirt, despite the current French-owned company being connected to the 80s original only because they bought the name. Namco Bandai, which last month snapped up Atari's European operations, may not boast a similarly iconic logo, but the Japanese company has even deeper gaming roots.
The result of a 2005 merger, the game-maker’s Namco half has been around since basically the beginning, having created much of the classic arcade pantheon, from Pac-Man and Galaga to Dig Dug and Pole Position. Bandai, meanwhile, is Japan's biggest toy maker and distributes manga, anime and live-action shows in North America (their franchises include Tamagotchi virtual pets, Dragonball Z, Sailor Moon and Power Rangers).
Like other old-school publishers, Namco Bandai mines its arcade-era—next month PS3ers will be able to download the all-classics Namco Museum Essentials and an HD-update of the lesser known Xevious as well as play Galaga, Pac-Man at a virtual Namco arcade inside PlayStation Home.
But the company has maintained its cultural relevance through the decades. They publish anime-RPGs like the Chopin-based Eternal Sonata or the Tales of… series; the super-weird, playground-inspired Sony download Noby Noby Boy (created by Keita Takahashi, whose NB original Katamari Damacy is being revamped for PS3); and Klonoa, a Wii-make of a 10-year-old cult classic which will hopefully benefit from the success of the similarly side-scrolling 2.5D LittleBigPlanet. This cleverly designed (and now visually enhanced) Playstation-era platformer is whimsical, and occasionally a little nightmarish, with a vibrant, surreal and adorable vibe that fits right in with Nintendo’s in-house aesthetic.
As does The Munchables, which mixes it’s cutesy quirkiness with a mis of classic and modern platforming and a budget price. Its stylized environments are fully 3D and the action is a twist on the Pac-Man and Katamari playbooks—your Munchable is a round creature who eats marauding space pirate vegetables (led by the evil Don Onion) and keeps growing in size, all while a crazy soundtrack plays along.
Namco Bandai has long been one of the key suppliers of Japanese culture to the west... and they’ve done it largely without watering down their products innate (and innately weird) Japaneseness for Western taste. So far, anyway.
At E3, a Namco Bandai PR rep told Gamasutra that “We truly [want to] globalize the development of Western-focused games.” Their western division, dubbed Surge, is working on the shooters Dead to Rights: Retribution and Splatterhouse and kicked off earlier this year with the gorgeous, Sam Jackson-voiced anime fighter Afro Samurai.
Its understandable why Namco Bandai would be eager to expand their international audience, given the increasing cultural divide between game communities. But Nintendo manages to appeal equally to Japanese and Western gamers, as did Namco back in the day. Hopefully, the company will look at its history of trans-oceanic success stories and realize that the regional eccentricities of their Japanese games (and other products) is precisely what has made the company matter for so many decades.