It was a pleasant surprise when it was first announced that WayForward would be tackling Advance Wars 1+2: Re-Boot Camp, and a new podcast revealed how the partnership came about for that specific title. Advance Wars 1+2: Re-Boot Camp director James Montagna said that WayForward always met with Nintendo at E3 and came prepared with a variety of different games. Then when the Advance Wars series was revived, the company contacted WayForward, as they thought they would be the right studio for the project. Here Montagna said during Fragments of the Silicon podcast
“It’s something that started because we talked to Nintendo for many, many years. I think it could have been in the 7-8 year range where every E3 we would meet with Nintendo and just talk to them and talk about potential things we could do together. Every year we would come up with a new proposal to delight, amuse and impress them, and we would make sure th at the meeting was always something that we would have a lot of fun together. They associate us with having a good time laughing and chatting about games, and they simply appreciate games as an art form.
After many years of this kind of interaction with Nintendo, they were really looking forward to the ‘WayForward Meeting’ as they said, and we would continue that and bring something interesting for them. Just building a real relationship. They are such great people and have such a passion for gaming and you can feel it when you talk to them. I think we were able to meet them in that passion because of course we at WayForward also love games. I think it was a really good match and it was a good fit for us to do something together, so when the opportunity arose that they were thinking about doing something like Advance Wars and bringing it back, they thought, ‘who could we do this with?’ They reached out about it and it’s something we all really love.
… For many of us who played Advance Wars back in the day, the moment they mentioned it, our jaws hit the floor. Like ‘Of course we’d love to help you create a reimaging of Advance Wars.’ It kind of started the project and it was an amazing experience.”
Thanks to Greatsong1 for sending the news tip!
