Horror is arguably one of the hardest things to make in the gaming space for a basic reason. If you don’t go far enough, it’s not going to be scary to players. On the flip side, if you go too far, it’ll turn certain people off or come off as “cheesy” more than anything else. So, imagine the surprise we all had last year when the first “Emio” trailers started to pop up. Everyone, including us on the Nintendo Entertainment Podcast, wondered what Nintendo was cooking up. As we found out, it was the Famicom Detective Club series returning after a two-decade hiatus.
If you don’t recall, in 2021, the original SNES games were remastered for the Switch. Then, right after, Yoshio Sakamoto made the pitch to do “Emio: The Smiling Man,” a very modern and dark story that was both brutal, emotional, and NOT something that Nintendo makes every day. Yet, in an interview with Inverse, Sakamoto admitted that Nintendo didn’t even flinch to approve it:
“I was honestly surprised how smoothly this project was approved. I was convinced that if we approached this theme sincerely and conveyed the message we truly wanted to convey, that would be the best way to live up to the expectations of Nintendo, who gave us the go-ahead, and that motivated us to do our best.”
There are many guesses as to why Nintendo did this, but the easiest one is that the Famicom Detective Club seemed to do well when it was brought back to life on Switch, so they likely figured it could be built upon. To that end, but Sakamoto and another team member in the interview said they felt there was still room for growth in the series and they’d love to take on the challenge of pushing things further.
