IGN has gone on record that Emio is not being made by Bloober Team.
In the latest episode of IGN’s Nintendo Voice Chat YouTube podcast, hosts Seth Macy and Rebekah Valentine revealed that they talked to their sources to try to verify this rumor. In Seth’s own words:
“We have reputable sources that say: Probably not a Bloober game.”
Rebekah then reiterated that they were not joking about it, like they sometimes did in previous shows. They asked around their sources, and were told it’s not by Bloober.
Rebekah also explained the source being that interview with Bloober Team CEO Piotr Babieno. As she explained, Piotr talked about a game that they were bringing to Nntendo’s platform, with a partner, and a lot of fans misread that as a claim that they were making a Nintendo exclusive game. Piotr and Bloober Team have not shared the full details on this game he mentioned in the interview.
We ourselves reported on that rumor, and a subsequent claim from Universo Nintendo editor Necro Felipe that the rumor was not true. In these circumstances, we have the odd situation of Necro Felipe and IGN being on the same page.
Perhaps fans wanted to believe Bloober Team was working on Emio because they just wanted to pin down any details that they could about the game. If the rumor was true, they might have been hoping that either Nintendo or Bloober Team would be forced to comment.
This all really goes back to Emio itself and its erstwhile developer and publisher, Nintendo. This game seems to be far from Nintendo’s wheelhouse, and it seems likely that they would be working with another studio to make it. We put forward the theory that this studio could be the Fatal Frame developer team at Tecmo Koei, but of course, we could be wrong there.
We will clarify another frequently repeated misinformation. While horror is usually not in Nintendo’s wheelhouse, they did develop the Fatal Frame spinoff Spirit Camera, for the 3DS. In fact, they also had older adventure games with horror themes, in the Famicom Detective Club duology of games.
The two Famicom Detective Club games were remade and released on the Switch in 2021. It just so happens that the game designer for those two games, was someone who recently published their latest work with Nintendo in Metroid Dread.
Yoshio Sakamoto is not only alive and well, but remains active as a senior staffer at Nintendo. It would not impossible if Yoshio himself decided to go back to these detective mystery game ideas with Emio.
