We Sing Robbie Williams

Nordic Games is a fairly new publisher to the video games industry. A company that was originally meant to fill in voids in the selection offered by parent company Game Outlet in their bargain bin, became something a little more as the original original We Sing outsold expectations with 300,000 copies sold so far (break-even was at 50,000 copies). Later this month the sequel We Sing Encore will launch with more songs, but today Nordic Games also announced that they are teaming up with Robbie Williams to launch We Sing Robbie Williams as he celebrates twenty years as an artist later this year.

We caught up managing director Pelle Lundborg, to ask him a few questions about the project. How was the contact made between you and Robbie's team?

- It was made through our agent in London, but originally we came up with the idea of doing a game with Robbie Williams.

Pelle Lundborg tells us that it takes them about three months to put a We Sing title together, if all the songs and assets are delivered. The team at Nordic Games is four man strong, with the developer Le Cortex only employing two people full-time, but adding people when the project demands it. A small operation compared to the label and management of an artist like Robbie Williams, who has sold 57 million albums worldwide, but also a very flexible organisation that can move quickly.

- Naturally it is easier when only dealing with one source, one artist, one label, in terms of getting the proper material and just dealing with fewer people. On the other side, they want to have a bigger say, so one could argue that there is less freedom. Getting a Robbie Williams Mii approved took a bit of time.

- Some songs were a bit more getting approval, such as a duet with Kylie Minogue, and a couple of songs, Mr. Bojangles and Beyond the Sea, didn't have videos we could use so they will feature live footage shot at Royal Albert Hall.

With Microsoft and Sony, each having their own karaoke/sing-a-long franchises, Nordic Games spotted an opening for such a game on the Nintendo Wii, and even if there has been talks of doing multiplatform titles, the organisation just isn't big enough to undertake it at the time. They do have ideas of possibly doing some promotional We Sing Robbie Williams game on iPhone and iPad, but that's just ideas at this point.

- We are going to do country specific We Sing titles for Germany and Australia. The local distributor there have been eager to do it, and they are large enough countries to warrant. It would be harder to do We Sing Norway. Well, perhaps at some point we could...

We Sing: Robbie Williams will build of the foundation of We Sing Encore, adding new features and improvement functionality since the original We Sing. But there will also be some new features such as a photo album. We Sing Robbie Williams will feature 25 songs, plus at least one bonus track to be revealed at a later date. They are also discussing various limited edition, that may feature a single or a t-shirt as a bonus.

We Sing Robbie Williams will be released alongside his greatest hits album, In and Out of Consciousness: The Greatest Hits 1990-2010, this October.