Grasshopper Manufacture, the Japanese developer responsible for offbeat titles like Shadows of the Damned and the upcoming Lollipop Chainsaw, is looking to get into social and smartphone games in a more serious way, something that president Goichi Suda touched on a bit during the Tokyo Game Show two months ago. In this week’s issue of Japan’s Famitsu magazine, the company revealed a bit more about their plans — including the launch of a new social-exclusive studio.
Grasshopper Universe, a joint venture between Suda’s company and Japanese social-game distribution giant DeNA, is part of GHM’s effort to adapt itself better for the mobile marketplace. “We released Frog Minutes [above] for the iPhone and iPod Touch on March 30 of this year and we were proceeding along with plans for other smartphone titles when DeNA opened up talks with us,” Grasshopper’s Akira Yamaoka told Famitsu. “We’re originally a console game company, and the experience we use to make games and come up with ideas is very different from the way companies specializing in social games handle things. We figured that we could come up with things that are more fun if we worked together.”
