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Namco's Smash Bros. team includes Tekken, Tales, Soulcalibur staff
A pair of statements on Nintendo of America's Nintendo Direct site offers more detail on Namco Bandai Studios' involvement with the next Super Smash Bros. game, coming to Wii U and 3DS. Director and Sora studio head Masahiro Sakurai (who appears to have gotten even younger) said that the team started development after the announcement of the project. "Currently, the prototype prepared by Namco Bandai Games and Namco Bandai Studios' special team looks pretty good, and it's working great," he said.Namco Bandai Studios' Masaya Kobayashi named some of the staff from Namco's side who will work on the fighting game, also describing their pedigree. "Yoshito Higuchi, the producer and the director of the 'Tales' series, Tetsuya Akatsuka, producer and director of 'Mobile Suit Gundam: Extreme Vs.,' the art director/sound director of the 'SoulCalibur' series, the main development team staff from the Tekken series...and that's just for starters." Kobayashi lists Ridge Racer games, We Ski, and Go Vacation as his own representative works.If having a random mishmash of Namco staff working on Smash Bros. concerns you, remember that Brawl had a lot of programming done by Game Arts, whose history of shooters, Lunar, and Grandia games is even less obviously transferable to fighting game expertise.
Namco spins off internal dev studios into 'Namco Bandai Studio'
Much like Prince becoming the "Love Symbol" back in better times (the mid-'90s), Namco Bandai Holdings announced plans to spin off its existing internal development teams into a separate company (that is also still totally part of Namco, by the way). The new company will be named "Namco Bandai Studio" and will comprise the the approximately 1,000 employees who are already part of Namco.The organizational change was spurred by Namco's interest in speedier dev times and tighter cohesion between disparate dev teams. The changeover won't go into effect until April 2, so you've still got at least a month to snag some classic Namco Bandai Holdings collectibles* while you still can!(*Note: Those don't actually exist. Unless you're a crazy person, of course.)
