New game announced for WiiWare – Tumblebugs

A new game, Tumblebugs, has been officially announced for WiiWare. The game is scheduled to release this fall.

Today Hyderabad and Los Angeles based Gameshastra announces an agreement to create the Wii version of Brisbane based Wildfire Studios’ wildly popular and critically acclaimed Tumblebugs franchise.

Since first launching in 2005, Tumblebugs and the recently released sequel Tumblebugs 2, have generated 40+ million downloads.

“We are strong believers in console based casual games,” says Prakash Ahuja, CEO of Gameshastra, “especially given the recent transformation of consoles from historically teen focused gaming devices to now becoming family entertainment hubs in many living rooms across the globe. We are very focused on titles that satisfy this new, broad demographic.”

Darren Baker, CEO of Wildfire Studios says “We enjoyed working with Gameshastra on Tumblebugs 2 PC, and are excited to collaborate again to bring our games to the emerging realm of console casual gaming. The broad consumer appeal and high production values of Wildfire’s titles make them a natural fit for the console space.”

“After working closely with the Wildfire team to create background art for Tumblebugs 2 we realized the game was a fantastic WiiWare candidate,” Rahul Sandil, VP of Sales at Gameshastra says. “The key to a successful Wii port is the ability to expand the title to take advantage of the unique Wiimote input system, and we feel we have came up with a very innovative design that combines the regular ‘shoot-to-match 3’ experience with some very unique Wii specific mechanics.”

The game is expected to be available on Nintendo’s WiiWare service in the fall of 2008.