"We were advised to emphasise that the game should have a tactile feel and simple rules that anyone can play. At Nintendo’s request, Nishi was appointed director of the development team and was assigned to Kensuke Tanabe, a well-known producer, responsible for managing Nintendo’s third-party collaborations. Nishi won’t be drawn on exactly how or why the Chibi-Robo project moved from Bandai to Nintendo, but he does say that it was Miyamoto who was initially interested in the game, specifically because of the character design.
It received conservatively positive previews at the time but was shelved in 2004, as Bandai mysteriously informed IGN that the game had been put on “indefinite hold.” That is until Shigeru Miyamoto took a liking to it. In this unreleased version, Chibi-Robo lived with his inventor rather than a family and was tasked with protecting their home from a pair of burglars. We had our disagreements along the way, but we thoroughly discussed the game while respecting each other, and I remember it as a fun experienceĪn early version of the game was announced by Bandai in 2003 and can be seen in action here. Back then, the game was a point-and-click adventure, quite different to the action-adventure it later became – but one thing that’s remained constant was the design of the character itself a tiny robot with a flat head, cute beady eyes and, most notably, a power cord trailing behind him like a tail.
In fact, if you own a Chibi-Robo amiibo, have a look under the base and you’ll see a Bandai-Namco copyright that remains in place to this day. When Chibi-Robo was first in development at Skip Ltd, it was originally to be published by Bandai. But those who did play Chibi-Robo remember it fondly as one of Nintendo’s great hidden treasures – though it almost wasn’t a Nintendo release at all…
With a short print run and barely any marketing campaign to speak of, its release went by almost unnoticed. Not just because he’s a mere four inches tall, but because his GameCube exclusive debut arrived so late in the west that most of the console’s owners had either moved on or were saving up for a Wii. Even the most enthusiastic Nintendo fan could be forgiven for overlooking Chibi-Robo.
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