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Square Enix to Acquire Taito

In the latest move amid industrywide reorganization, Square Enix Co., the maker of the Dragon Quest and Final Fantasy video games, announced Monday it will acquire smaller rival Taito Corp. for 67 billion yen. Kyocera Corp., Taito’s parent with a 36 percent stake, said it has already agreed to Square Enix’s bid. Taito, which operates 270 arcades nationwide, is known as the creator of Space Invaders, the arcade video game that became a phenomenon in the early 1980s. Square Enix was born from a merger of the two major role playing game makers two years ago. The combined sales of Taito and Square Enix stood at 158.42 billion yen for the year ended in March.

Disney Branded Cell Phone: A Sign of the Times

Disney Branded Cell Phone: A Sign of the TimesIt’s not the first time that we’ve seen a major brand license a well-known icon to create a designer cell phone. Recently, Ferrari joined the bandwagon with a custom-tailored device by Sharp for Vodafone, available now in Europe and Japan. WWJ thinks many of the usual suspects (cars, sports, fashion, music) are likely to follow suit into the 2005 year-end gift-giving season as well. With music-enabled phones achieving white-hot popularity, perhaps we’ll see boutique handsets dedicated to ABBA, the Beach Boys or even Courtney Love (maybe not since Hilary Duff beat her to it), preloaded with all their ‘greatest hits’ and available just in time for Christmas.

But why stop there? Other global brands (even obscure ones) must be thinking ‘me too’ about now as well; Gucci and Playboy come to mind along with every major league sports team — and don’t forget block-buster movies (a real ‘Bat Phone’ would be very cool). So, what does any of this have to do with Japan you might ask? Plenty.

Amp'd Mobile Acquires NINJA's BREW

Amp’d Mobile announced its acquisition of NINJA Mobile’s development division, which will become a part of Amp’d Mobile while NINJA focuses on expanding its mobile publishing business. The acquisition includes NINJA’s esteemed United States and Japanese development teams and NINJA’s “Rope Platform” technology. NINJA’s Rope Platform is the base upon which the Amp’d community, blogging, dating, commerce, multiplayer gaming, location-based and additional server-driven applications, are being built.

Namco Ports RidgeRacer for BREW

EZweb gamers can rejoice in spending about $5 to download and burn RidgeRacer rubber now that Namco has made the popular title compatible with Qualcomm’s BREW platform. While apparently only available for the new W31SA at launch, no doubt it’s just a matter of time for it to become more widely available across KDDI’s WIN handset fleet… and then… The World! We also noticed another interesting Namco title, while snooping around their mobile site, called IdolMaster. Talk about RPGs! WWJ members log in for the full skinny!

Tokyo Game Show Gears Up

The organizers of the Tokyo Game Show 2005 (September 16 – 18) have just announced a summary of details for this years event. As of August 4, 130 companies are committed to participation, with 1,429 booth units reserved. The number of exhibitors exceeds the 117 at the last year’s show and is the highest ever since the first Tokyo Game Show was held in 1996. We also noted they have booked 31 exhibitors from overseas, an increase over last year’s total of just 18, and that DoCoMo will participate again as a “Special Sponsor.”

Apple Opens iTunes Japan

Apple Computer Inc. launched its music-downloading service, iTunes Music Store, in Japan on Thursday with 1 million songs, most of which will be available for about 150 yen a pop, the maker of the hit iPod portable player said. Japanese music on Sony labels are not available on iTunes, said Sony Music Entertainment spokeswoman Kiyono Yoshinaga. “We are in talks with Apple, but we have not reached an agreement at this time,” she said, declining to give details.