Gamebryo swings onto Wii

Much like mainstream acceptance of the system itself, the Wii tools market is showing rapid growth with Emergent being the latest to announce its technology is available for the Nintendo platform.

The Gamebryo engine, which is optimised to work on symmetric multiprocessor, asymmetric multiprocessor and single processor systems, provides a general-purpose technological base for developers to speed up the game creation process.

The news comes at a time of increased activity for Emergent, having recently closed a $12 million round of investment, launched the Emergent Platform for online game development and opened a new Eastern European office in Poland.

“We are delighted to announce the Wii port of our Gamebryo engine,” said Geoffrey Selzer, CEO of Emergent.

“With the success of Nintendo’s Wii console catching much of the industry off guard and offering fresh interactive features, developers need new tools to be able to develop for multiple platforms that offer vastly different capabilities and require different programming techniques.

“We are committed to making multiplatform development as painless as possible while still delivering industry leading performance. Gamebryo for Wii simply sets a new standard for middleware designed for this top selling platform. We are very proud to be part of Nintendo’s Third Party Tools program.”

With the addition of Emergent to the line-up of official third-party tool providers, Nintendo’s third-party tools programme is clearly growing at an impressive rate, having already secured the likes of Fonix, Torque and the Vicious Engine in recent months.