Vanpool

» see vanpool.co.jp as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

Go to vanpool.co.jp today and the site is still there, works page and all, with a letter sitting in front of it. The letter opens with the seasonal greeting that formal Japanese business correspondence opens with, states that Vanpool Co., Ltd. was dissolved as of 31 May 2023 due to various circumstances, thanks you for your custom and apologizes for the trouble. Below it sits a phone number, a fax number, a basement address in West Shinjuku, and the name of the representative liquidator, Jun Tsuda, who had been the studio's planning chief.

Vanpool came out of Love-de-Lic, the studio behind Moon: Remix RPG Adventure, which broke up after its third game. In the spring of 1999 the UFO: A Day in the Life crew walked out and started their own shop. The other half, the people who had made L.O.L., became skip Ltd. Taro Kudo ran Vanpool as president and Kazuyuki Kurashima did the art. The first two games they put out were PlayStation 2 titles that never left Japan.

It did not even become a kabushiki kaisha until 1 April 2008, nine years into its own existence. Through nearly its whole run it stayed a small firm with one very large client.

~ the case file ~

~ tingle ~

In 2006 Vanpool made a Zelda spin-off starring the least heroic character in the series. Freshly-Picked Tingle's Rosy Rupeeland handed you Tingle, the forest nuisance from Majora's Mask, and made the whole game about money: you haggled over the price of every piece of information, and you dropped rupees into a pool to make a tower grow out of it. It shipped in Japan and later in Europe and never got a North American release at all, a thing that could still happen in 2006 to a game Nintendo itself published.

It came nowhere near me. A Japanese and European DS release in 2006 was forum material. At twenty-two I was finishing a degree over TTNet, and a handheld Zelda spin-off was not what anyone around me was spending on.

~ the support years ~

From 2003 the studio worked almost entirely on Nintendo hardware, starting with minigames inside Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga. On the 3DS it got three games of its own between 2012 and 2018, the Dillon's Rolling Western series, an armadillo tower defense thing with a western setting and a rolling protagonist. After 2012 the co-development work grew heavier: direction and scenario on Paper Mario: Sticker Star, then years working next to HAL Laboratory on Kirby. Its last credit was Kirby's Return to Dream Land Deluxe in February 2023, three months before the notice went up.

~ what a support studio leaves ~

Support development is work designed not to show. If you played Sticker Star or the recent Kirby games you played Vanpool, and nothing on the box told you so in a way you would have registered. Twenty-four years of that produces a company with a serious catalog and almost no public name, which is why a studio that worked on two of Nintendo's largest franchises closed with a letter on its own website and about a day of coverage.

The legal entity was formally extinguished on 29 February 2024, nine months after the dissolution. The website outlived both dates.

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