The PR rep is a monkey because of course it is
After taking time away from Access games for health reasons and to become a Buddhist priest, Hidetaka “Swery” Suehiro ultimately left Access Games in October 2016. Now he’s back to making games after starting his own development studio called White Owls. Swery, also known as Swery65, is most known for his work designing cult hits Deadly Premonition and D4: Dark Dreams Don’t Die, the latter of which was an unfinished episodic title.
While we may never get to see D4 finished, Swery promises to deliver what we all love about his work: “bizarre” and “dreamlike” content. On the White Owls website once you wade through pictures of owls and stuffed monkeys you can find the company message “Do you need more weird content? White Owls is prepared to give you the unique content that you’re looking for, which you won’t be able to find anywhere else.”
Below that you can find a message from the man himself who explains the deep meaning behind the company name. It is reference to ancient Greece where “owls were called sages of the forest, and thought to be servants of Athena (Minerva), the goddess of wisdom.”
The PR representative is Sharapova the monkey who has voiced messages that are something along the lines of “Ooh ooh ahh ahh! Ooh ooh ah! Oooooh… Ahh! Uki-uki! Ooh ahh! Uki-ki-ki!” I spent too much time studying Japanese that my monkey skills have completed vanished it seems. You can email the monkey as well.
In an e-mail exchange with Gamasutra, Swery explains that he was encouraged by western developers to go independent in order to have creative freedom and focus on what he wants to make. He adds “We want to create games for YOU, the people who like us. Games that are bizarre, scary, grotesque, and dreamlike, yet also have a strange realism. Games that remind you of the past, that are comical, and sad yet lovable. Those are the kind of games we’ll be making.”
I for one am very excited to see one of my favorite developers back in action. 2017 is off to a great start!
