A Big Makeover

Area 35 started as a small company with just three developers working on its first project, the cute and bite-sized strategy game, Tiny Metal. It launched in 2017, and now, nearly a decade later, the company has grown to more than 300 employees. Though players might know Area 35 as the Tiny Metal creators, many of them don’t know it’s also a studio that’s worked on game franchises like Final Fantasy, movies like Dragon Ball Super: Super Hero, Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba – The Movie: Infinity Castle, and so much more. “Let’s just say the majority of all major [game] IPs, we have worked on,” Area 35 CEO Hiroaki Yura tells me at Tokyo Game Show. 

That includes the “biggest horror game from Japan” and the “biggest collectible game in Japan” too. Yura lets me piece together that puzzle (and I’m sure you can, too). Area 35 has also worked on a lot for Blizzard, with many of its developers being ex-Blizzard employees themselves. That’s probably why Michael Chu, a key Blizzard writer who served as a narrative lead on Overwatch, is writing the story for Tiny Metal 2, Area 35’s ambitious follow-up to the first Tiny Metal. The team has also enlisted I Am Setsuna and Fantasy Life writer Hirotaka Inaba and Yusuke Kozaki, who is a guest character designer for the Fire Emblem series, Ace Combat 8: Wings of Theve, Pokémon Go, Overwatch, and more. 

Yura tells me Area 35’s extracurricular gaming, movie, and anime efforts allow the studio to avoid concerns like the first Tiny Metal being an “astronomical hit.”