Ready at Dawn discusses Okami Wii port, not planning on creating a Wii title, believes the system’s novelty has worn off

Ready at Dawn has worked on one Wii game in their brief history. That title was Okami, and it only required the developer to port the PlayStation 2 version over to Nintendo’s console. Sadly, it seems like Ready at Dawn’s first title on Wii may be their last as well. After discussing the company’s work on the Okamiden port, Ru Weerasuriya indicated that the company has no interest in working with the system again. Therefore, it’s unlikely that we’ll see an original title from the studio on Wii.

In all honesty we’d never thought of doing a port – I don’t think we built the company for that, but we just decided to do that as a passion project.I loved Okami, I think that artistically it’s one of the most amazing things to come out of the industry. Working on it was more of a technical challenge – we started with no assets and literally reverse-engineered the whole thing back onto Wii. It was not your typical port, but it was fun. But it’s not something we would do again, I think.

“To tell you the truth, I don’t think it’s something we would do (make an original Wii game). I understand the power that the Wii has out there, but at the same time, I’ve tried to be a Wii gamer, like all my friends, but most of us have picked it up and dropped it after a few months. I think it wears off. I think the whole novelty wears off with the Wii, and that’s one of the big reasons why we wouldn’t tackle a Wii game. I think so (the novelty is wearing off across the board/will affect sales). I think you’re already seeing that now. The novelty is wearing off, and the only people who are really successful on the platform is Nintendo. It’s not like anybody else out there is really happy with the games and the sales that they make on that platform. So it’s going to work well for [Nintendo], as all of their platforms usually do, but even in America we’re seeing now that it’s slowly dwindling down. Purely from personal experience, I can tell you that most of the people I know who have bought a Wii have it sitting on a shelf somewhere with dust on it, and they haven’t used it in a long, long time.”