Emio – The Smiling Man: Famicom Detective Club has a Nintendo veteran of 42 years in the writing chair once again – despite proclaiming that, after the second game in the series in 1989, he could never write again.
Nintendo just published a new ‘Ask the Developer‘ writeup featuring Emio – The Smiling Man: Famicom Detective club producer Yoshio Sakamoto, who helped co-create the Metroid series, and assistant producer Kaori Miyachi, a veteran of the Super Smash Bros. games. Partway through, the pair reveal that, even after releasing remakes of the first two Famicom Detective Club games back in 2021, they still didn’t know they’d be working on Emio – The Smiling Man.
This is in no small part thanks to Sakamoto thinking he’d be done with writing for good. Miyachi recalls that Sakamoto first commented in 1989, when the second Famicom Detective Club game released, that he was finished with writing, and the latter adds that this was his way of “declaring to the whole world my inability to keep writing.”
Sakamoto didn’t just say this in 1989 – he most recently said it in an artbook that came with the Famicom Detective Club remakes in 2021. “But the desire to create something new again was always in my heart. I was gathering ideas in my mind,” Sakamoto explains, adding that one of these “ideas” was where a “victim is found dead with a paper bag over their head.”
If this sounds familiar, that’s because it’s the basic premise of Emio – The Smiling Man. Someone is found murdered with a paper bag over their head, a smile etched into it, and from there a grand murder mystery unravels. “Even though I hadn’t started writing the plot at the time, I told Miyachi-san that I was thinking of a story called Emio (smiling man) and she said, ‘Wow, that sounds interesting!'” Sakamoto recalls.
But what pulled Sakamoto back to the writing chair to pen Emio’s story? It’s all thanks to the two Famicom Detective Club remakes, which Sakamoto says became “much more than just remakes. Seeing the broad range of expressions and potential to take the animation quality even higher, I began to seriously think about creating something new again and was motivated to write a new story.”
Just a few months after Sakamoto mentioned Emio to Miyachi, the latter asked him how the story was coming along and said they were “looking forward to it!” This understandably prompted Sakamoto to “get serious about writing this story,” and Miyachi’s genuine enthusiasm for helped spur the veteran developer into making Emio’s story concept a reality.
Emio – The Smiling Man: Famicom Detective Club, the first new game in the series in 35 years, launches tomorrow on August 29. You can play Emio’s demo right now, which features the first three chapters from the final game.
Read up on our upcoming Switch games guide for a look at all the other exclusives Nintendo has planned for this year.
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