Nintendo's Treehouse, the localization department at Nintendo of America, gave 1UP an interview on the upcoming Brain Age, the English-language version of the Japanese Brain Training sales sensation. The interview was given by Treehouse's Scot Ritchey and Alan Averill, and backed up by Nintendo PR director Matt Atwood.
Ritchey is first asked by 1UP about Ryuta Kawashima, the man behind the brain training phenomenon. Via his popular book, Kawashima inspired Nintendo president Satoru Iwata to assemble a small team within Nintendo and gave them 90 days to make Brain Age a reality. "When he showed Kawashima, he was very interested in it and lent his name to it," Ritchey explains. "And he tested a lot of the training exercises in the software to make sure that they did in fact increase blood flow to the cerebral cortex, which is the purpose of a lot of these exercises."
Averill fields questions on the legitimacy of the theory that the game helps exercise players' brains. "They had people actually play these games with that on their head, and they used MRI machines to check it out, and confirm that blood flow was increased to the prefrontal cortex," Averill explains. Ritchey adds, "Professor Kawashima's papers, prior to working with Nintendo, often involved showing that these types of exercises that increase bloodflow to the prefrontal cortext also decreased symptoms of dementia and things like that."
Atwood explains the difficulties of marketing a title with such a broad range of potential appeal, as well: "It's almost a bigger challenge for us, we still have to work with a budget and all those things, and we've got to communicate to a broad range. PR and word-of-mouth of this title is what sold it in Japan. And any good product and any big success has a massive word-of-mouth component, and this is no different. Not to say we're relying on it. We're certainly communicating it, we have AARP to In Flight Magazine to the game books; it has a broader reach." Atwood also expects word-of-mouth to play a big part in Brain Age marketing, as it did in Japan.
Brain Age releases just one week from now, on April 17, at around $20 per copy.