This touching tale will hit an all-new medium.
Yesterday, game developer Kan Gao took to YouTube to announced that his RPG To The Moon will receive an anime feature film. The project will be a co-production between Japan and China, with, as Gao states, “China doing most of the funding and Japan doing most of the production.” Gao noted that he isn’t able to state the staff or studios as of press time in his video, though he notes that they are “pretty big players in the animation industry.”
Gao adds that the project was facilitated by Beijing’s Ultron Event Horizon, and that a “significant budget” was cleared for production. He reveals that the overall budget will be higher than that of Your Name. Gao, himself, will play a role in the script editing and advising process for the film.
You can check out the full video below:
To the Moon was developed by Freebird Games, with Kan Gao serving as designer (with Lannie Neely III), writer, and composer for the project. The game launched on Valve’s Steam marketplace on November 1, 2011 (11/1/11). The game was awarded GameSpot’s “Best Story” award for 2011, beating out Catherine, Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective, Portal 2, and Xenoblade Chronicles.
Freebird Games describes the title as:
Dr. Rosalene and Dr. Watts have peculiar jobs: They give people another chance to live, all the way from the very beginning… but only in their patients’ heads.
Due to the severity of the operation, the new life becomes the last thing the patients remember before drawing their last breath. Thus, the operation is only done to people on their deathbeds, to fulfill what they wish they had done with their lives, but didn’t.
This particular story follows their attempt to fulfill the dream of an elderly man, Johnny. With each step back in time, a new fragment of Johnny’s past is revealed. As the two doctors piece together the puzzled events that spanned a life time, they seek to find out just why the frail old man chose his dying wish to be what it is.
And Johnny’s last wish is, of course… to go to the moon.
Source: YouTube (Kan Gao)
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