Harvest Moon creator opens new studio

Newsbrief: Yasuhiro Wada, formerly a producer at Marvelous Entertainment and the creator of long-running farming game series Harvest Moon, has formed a new company called Toybox in Japan. Wada hasn't yet described what kind of projects the start-up has in the works, nor has he said he will target certain platforms. However, he said Toybox's goals are to "make gamers happy" and to "be of help to the world in some way," according to a translation from Andriasang. Prior to Toybox, Wada spent more than 10 years at Marvelous Entertainment working on titles like the Harvest Moon series, No More Heroes, and Little King's Story. He left the Japanese publisher in October 2010 to join Grasshopper Manufacture. Wada left Grasshopper a year later -- the company's CEO Goichi Suda attributed the departure to Wada not "[fitting] into the culture," implying conflicting differences between his publishing background and the developer's operations. It's unclear what projects Wada worked on while at Grasshopper.