Bring Crystalis to the Nintendo Wii Virtual Console!

As you know by now, I support and engage in little campaigns to try to get some things accomplished in this world. Some are more important than others, but all of them mean something to me, your humble blogger. The little campaign referenced in the title of this entry is about bringing a video game to the Nintendo Wii virtual console.

If you haven’t heard of Crystalis, then you are either not a fan of the role playing game (RPG) genre of video gaming or you’re a fan of the genre, but haven’t studied some of the classic games from the old 8-bit systems. Crystalis was released in America in 1990. It features a post-apocalyptic setting where modern cities have fallen and people are surviving as members of clans and villages. Today, this might be rendered in beautiful three dimensional graphics by a company like Square-Enix, but back in 1990 the good folks at SNK did a spectacular job creating this world on an 8-bit system as you can see in the video at the bottom of this entry.

If you have the Nintendo Wii and you’ve played around with their Wii Shop channel, then you know they have something called the Virtual Console (and chances are that if you don’t have a Wii, you’ve at least heard of this feature). The Virtual Console brings games from yesterday to the Wii and makes them available for purchase by gamers. As a guy who really enjoyed Crystalis, I thought that I’d send a message to the people over at Nintendo asking them if they could get this game listed on the Virtual Console. Here is the response that they sent me:

To tell you the truth, I don’t know if Crystalis will ever become a Virtual Console game. However, it is great to hear from the many fans excited about the Virtual Console! So many of you have contacted Nintendo regarding the games you would love to see added. While we appreciate your excitement and support, decisions regarding which games will be made available come from several different companies and are influenced by a variety of factors apart from consumer suggestions.

For more details about the Virtual Console, including an updated list of available software titles, check out the following web page:

http://www.nintendo.com/wii/virtualconsole

New Virtual Console titles should continue to be released weekly across all systems, so there’s hope that the title you’re looking for will eventually appear. Keep checking our website (www.nintendo.com) for updates!

As you can tell, most of the response seems to be cut and paste from a generic “answer” database, but at least the person who responded had the good will to write an original sentence or two in the beginning of the e-mail. As a consumer, I appreciate that extra effort when it is so easy to just send a form response these days. I did some digging online and I read somewhere that Nintendo actually owns the rights to this old SNK title; I guess somewhere along the line they purchased the game (I may have that portion incorrect, I’m not sure). If that is true then it might be very easy for Nintendo to make this game available on the Virtual Console.

For those of you interested in watching a few minutes of this game, including the opening sequence which explains what is happening, feel free to watch the video below. You’ll be able to see the first few minutes of the game in all of its 8-bit glory!