Soulcalibur, Tekken, making move to iPhone, iPod touch, new Namco Apple gaming chief reveals

Jonny Evans
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August 05, 2009
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More news from Namco Bandai’s recently formed Apple Games Division, which is now looking to bring in some legendary classic arcade titles including Soulcalibur and Tekken to the iPhone, iPod touch and other similar devices (iProd, anyone?)

Interviewed by Kotaku, Namco’s newly-hired Apple games chief, Jonathan Kromrey, talks the talk, saying the company is looking into how to make its heavyweight console classics work using Apple’s control UI’s. Might we see voice controlled titles soon?

“My charge is to make games that are the best for the iPod touch and iPhone," explains Kromrey. "There is a gold rush to do Apps for the App store and Namco is at the forefront of that movement."

In future the company plans to introduce a huge range of titles for Apple’s platforms, ranging from casual gaming titles to action and adventure titles.

“In the past Namco's been known for its depth of arcade experience, games like Pac-Man, Galaga, Soulcalibur and Tekken," he said. “I'm here to champion new things, new IP, to discover what the new Pac-Man is for the iPhone."

He also talked a little about price, and from what he said it suggests Namco titles will be available at prices up to around $5, with some classics offered for slightly more.

‘Course, what we think may happen here at 9to5Mac is that Apple will open up a new Pro games store on the App Store. Here it will offer titles in higher resolution than their iPhone/iPod touch equivalents. These titles will be sufficiently high res to run on your TV using an Apple TV, on your iTablet/iProd/Apple’s biggest secret ever that everyone is talking about/whatever...will they also run on Mac?

We hope so. Apple's serious about gaming these days...

Comments (2)

Tom (not verified) | August 05, 2009 - 4:09am

No need for the ATV to run on the TV. I'd imagine they'd fire up the Media Out Interface Patent, and have the product running via a dock connected to the HDTV. Same with an iPhone running through to the TV - popped in the dock to show a video on it, or wirelessly linked to play games on the TV perhaps.

Good to see Namco on board

Dr.Evil (not verified) | August 05, 2009 - 7:01am

I don't understand what your fist sentence means since ATV's main purpose is to connect you digital media on your computer to your HDTV.

I could see something like this: You'd run a game on the handheld device but you could display the game onto the TV through the wireless connection between the handheld device and the ATV. Going even further if the game is synced and loaded in your iTunes on your Mac and perhaps synced onto the ATV, Apple may get some synergy going between the Mac, ATV and the handheld to share processing tasks so that it could run more complicated games than you could on just the handheld alone. Ultimately the handheld device in this configuration could become the controller for the game.