New gaming studio has a viral hit thanks to mola mola character

Select Button Games at the Yahoo! Japan Internet Creative Award ceremony.

“Manbo is my hero,” says 25-year-old Nakahata Koya, director of Select Button Games. “Manbo is the biggest of the bony fish but they are very sensitive. There is a big contradiction that they die so easily even when they are so big. That really attracted me.”

The three-man Tokyo-based gaming team is responsible for the lovable pixel-art mola mola you see flooding your Facebook feeds in Singapore, South Korea, Indonesia, and even Brunei. The mola mola is basically an ocean sunfish, the largest bony fish in the ocean.

Nakahata Koya, Miyagawa Keisuke (programming), and Tsukada Takumi (design), all 25 years old, first met at a web production company called KAYAC. The trio left for the same reasons – they wanted to further their own talents, and ended up in different companies. As friends, they first started to make a game for fun.

“We developed Survive! Mola Mola! with many hours, spending time together like a family,” Nakahata says. It took the team half a year before it was launched on both Android and iOS, in June and August 2014 respectively. Things skyrocketed from launch. Survive! Mola Mola! was a huge hit in Japan, with 600,000 downloads immediately after its release.

One of the higher growth ranks you can attain for your mola mola.

“It was not a scale we were able to manage on our own. We were pretty much satisfied with this result but on the other hand the situation was out of control,” Nakahata adds. The trio decided to start their own company – Select Button Games – in order to go full-time into game development and make Survive! Mola Mola! even better. Nakahata’s childhood dream was to have his own game development company, and that has since been fulfilled – all thanks to the ocean sunfish.

To date, Survive! Mola Mola! has accumulated 150,000 downloads for its Traditional Chinese version, 300,000 downloads for its English version (the one we’re all playing), one million downloads for the Japanese version and a whopping 3.3 million downloads for the Korean version. The startup didn’t disclose how many active gamers it has.

Nakahata says the team will continue to update Survive! Mola Mola!, but that it is also working on a new, top-secret game. According to Nakahata, indie development in Japan has a good environment in which to thrive. “The relationships between each indie company is tight and we often exchange information such as market profitabilities and trends.”

One such trend right now is definitely the mola mola.

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