Theme Aquarium - Bullfrog Productions oddity.

[PlasticPony]

Hello,

"Theme Aquarium (テーマ アクアリウム?) is a simulation video game developed by Bullfrog Productions and published by Electronic Arts, in which the player creates and controls a sea life aquarium. It was originally released on December 17, 1998 for PlayStation only in Japan. The game was later ported to Microsoft Windows under the name Aquarium and was released in Europe (2000/2001)."

For many years i have been curious about this oddity of a game. Being from Canada, the Theme series from bullfrog (Theme Park, Theme Hospital) did not have as strong of a following as it does in the UK. For that reason i thought someone here may have better insight. In 1998 i was importing a lot of Japanese video games when Theme Aquarium caught my eye, i had been very excited to hear there was a sequel but equally confused when i heard of no localizations and that it would only be released for the Playstation. After importing it and having no knowledge of Japanese, i found the graphics to be quite underwhelming. in addition, the game was generally unplayable without being able to read Japanese"

So my questions are:
Why did Bullfrog create this Japanese only game to begin with ?
Was the game well received in Japan? (It got poor reviews for the PC version)
Was there ever plans to create an English Playstation version ?
Why would EA choose to take two years to create a translation for a game that already had outdated graphics, while porting this to a completely different platform ?
And why in the world did they drop, the THEME prefix creating even less consumer interest ?
The first two games in the series were so incredible yet this one so lacking, were the same bullfrog members even involved in this project ?

If anyone has any insight into this, or any further info on Theme Aquarium / Aquarium it would be greatly appreciated.


URLS:
http://www.gamefaqs.com/ps/574984-theme-aquarium/data
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theme_Aquarium?oldid=cur
http://www.gamershell.com/pc/aquarium/review.html


Thanks

[merman]

It was briefly mentioned in my recent article on Theme Hospital for gamesTM. Sony created the Japanese version first and Bullfrog then converted it to PC.

[PlasticPony]

Thanks for the info.

I was able to find the extra questions from the article on the GamesTM forum, but sadly couldn't track down the original interview, would love to read it some day as Theme Hospital was always a favorite in my youth.

However, I found this article while searching today which gives more insight to my own questions:

"Definitely the worst game to bear the "Bullfrog" name on the box, Aquarium is an awful PC conversion of an awful Playstation "aquarium management game" that was released only in Japan. In a shady attempt to capitalize on the popularity of Theme Park and the Bullfrog name, EA released foisted this Real Dog onto the unsuspecting public in 2001. Fortunately, very few gamers took the bait, making the game one of the most obscure in EA's canon - and deservedly so. How bad is the game? UK's PC Zone explains well: "Sometimes the cynicism of game publishers astonishes us. Not often, because we've grown quite used to it, but now and again a title is released that makes you want to throw large stones at their office windows or clap your hands at their sheer audacity. Get this. In 1998, the Japanese branch of EA released a pretty substandard Theme Park rip-off for the PlayStation called Theme Aquarium, presumably because fish are more popular than roller coasters in Japan. Three years later, and following the entirely coincidental mass-popularity of The Sims and Theme Park World, the European office decides to port said game to the PC. They drop the Theme bit off the title, so as not to be too obvious, and hope that a few poor sods take the bait. To top it all off, it's an absolutely awful conversion of a terrible game, that would have looked slightly dated more than five years ago. We're talking Megadrive and SNES type graphics. Hell, they would look ropey on a GameBoy Colour. The idea, as you've probably guessed, is to build an aquarium, fill it with fish and watch the visitors pile in. You can install all sorts of different tank shapes, buy rare fish from dodgy dealers, organise expeditions to catch them, hire cleaners and doctors and train dolphins to do tricks. It's like a scaled down version of Theme Hospital, with a couple of original ideas poorly implemented. EA Japan's website says that Theme Aquarium was developed by Bullfrog, but their name is mentioned nowhere in this and the manual cites some Japanese programmers instead. Which sounds a lot more likely. Bullfrog would never stoop to producing something as horrendous as this." Actually, the game was coded by a few ex-Bullfrog programmers, but that still doesn't justify EA using the Bullfrog name. In any event, Aquarium is a sorry excuse of a business simulation. It's boring, full of incongruencies and dumb AI, and is basically just not 1% as fun as Theme Park. A Real Dog in every sense of the word."

-written by Home of the Underdogs