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PictureBook Games: Pop-Up Pursuit is a WiiWare video game released in 2009 by Nintendo. The game costs 1000 and 800 Nintendo Points in Japan an NA/PAL regions, respectively. Pop-Up Pursuit is a board game styled title developed by Grounding. A DSiWare successor was created called PictureBook Games: The Royal Bluff.

Development[]

The developers of the game were discussing who they should go to to publish their video game concept. Half jokingly they mentioned Nintendo yet were able to set up a meeting with president Satoru Iwata who agreed to fund the title as long as they set up an entity, which led to the creation of Grounding. They said that for a long time they've been talking about making a picture pop-up game. Before PictureBook Games they were discussing the possibilities of creating an adventure RPG but decided against it due to an unnamed The Legend of Zelda video game.

After six months of developing Pop-Up Pursuit, a few of the designers from Grounding presented their prototype to Nintendo at a sukiyaki restaurant in Kyoto, Japan. Noboru Hotta, the art director, was among the people representing Grounding at the presentation. Going into it with full confidence, he was shocked to hear that Nintendo didn't like the game. This was before the game was a "pop-up" game and was at the time an adventure title. Once they realized that the project, which was being developed by only ten people, was just too big in size, they decided to scale it down a bit.

Kensuke Tanabe suggested they make it a game that is easier for everyone one to play, which led the project to a board game styled title. Before this revelation, Tanabe deliberated for quite some time what type of game it should be after the adventure aspect fell through. He stated that he went outside to smoke and after one cigarette, came bursting back into the room with the developers and loudly said "A board game!" The developers at Grounding said that after that, they were "so excited you could almost see exclamation marks over our heads!"

The people representing Nintendo, producers Kensuke Tanabe and Risa Tabata, said that the reaction to this game among play testers in Japan was surprisingly more positive than another game they worked on: Metroid Prime, a game, while popular in America, Europe and Australia, didn't manage to strike a chord with Japanese players. Tabata stated that the response was much more "enthusiastic" this time around and that many people in Japan explained to her that Metroid Prime was "fun, but not for everyone".

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