Nintendo has finalised an agreement with Dynamo Pictures for 34.5 million yen (USD$245,000) that will see the house of Mario acquire the Tokyo-based CG company. As part of the deal, Nintendo will be renaming it Nintendo Pictures, and integrating it into the vast Nintendo group by October 3 of this year.
It looks like they’ll be using this new influx of CG expertise to generally improve the designing and development capabilities of the Nintendo group for future projects, following the company’s announcement that its longer-term strategy is to branch out its intellectual property from its comfortable handheld and console gaming mediums. The new addition will focus primarily on the computer graphics and motion capture side of the development process of these future projects.
Although there hasn’t been any official announcement stating this; with Nintendo and Universal’s plans to release the Super Mario Bros. movie next year on April 7, it’s more than reasonable to speculate Dynamo Pictures will have some kind of involvement in this upcoming project, and it’ll prove to be a rite of passage, to gauge how Nintendo Pictures will work in a larger, collaborative environment.
So, here’s a quick rundown of the CG company’s history, up until now:
Dynamo Pictures has been around as an integrated group of Studio Dynamo since 2004, creating CG for Japanese films, video games, commercials, slot machines, and events, and in 2011 split off from its founding company into Dynamo Pictures, as it’s currently known as today. The company has been previously known for collaborating with Nintendo (one amongst an exhaustive list of companies), and that matches Nintendo’s usual M.O. of acquiring companies it has experience in working with.
Although Dynamo Pictures, as it stands, is a fairly unknown CG production studio, perhaps its new revitalisation as Nintendo Pictures will see its potential flourish under the guidance of its new parent company.
