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Toy Shop Tycoon details

Main role: Producer
Secondary roles: Interface design/ Models / Textures

Year: 2008
Platform: Nintendo DS
Support: Box / Retail
Production: 5 months
Developer: Seed Studios Lda.
Client: GameInvest
Publishers: Majesco (USA,CAN) / Atari (AU,NZ) / Codemasters (Europe)

Presentation

Toy Shop Tycoon is a NintendoDS videogame available in any specialized videogames retail store.
You take over your grandfather’s toy shop and manage inventory, develop new toys, and meet the folks in your community.

Development

The original pitch was about a Pet Shop but got quickly scrapped and changed into Toy Shop.
The idea came from Bruno, lead programmer and co-founder of Seed Studios. At the time, 3 game ideas were pitched to Game Invest, a game investment company. They picked up and bought Toy Shop and later pitched it to Majesco who published it in North America.

Production was quick as this was the team first console project and everyone was extremely excited to finally be able to work on a stable machine like Nintendo DS.

The game got lukewarm reviews with the occasional 5 stars from more excited fans. Considering this was our first console game and it was done in such a short amount of time I usually say it was a perfect game 🙂

Team

Curiosities

Toy Shop is the original name of the game. When it was released in Europe Codemasters decided to add the “Tycoon” to the name.
The European cartridge is 32mbit while the American is 16mbit. The extra 6 languages for the European territories forced the exponential increase in size and extra cost.
There is only one box signed by the entire Seed Studios team. You can ask Diogo Vasconcelos at “Press Play” in Porto to see it 🙂

Links

Offcial Nintendo page: http://www.nintendo.com/games/detail/TZmICriAB4iN6Zu9v_7FVgEFSW5oGax9
Majesco page: http://www.majescoent.com/games/toy-shop
Wikipedia: http://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toy_Shop_Tycoon