Watermelon Game – aka Suika Game – the fruit-matching puzzler, has now sold more than 3.6 million on Switch.
The creators of the Nintendo Switch viral hit Watermelon Game – also known as Suika Game – have revealed that the puzzle title has now sold more than 3.66 million copies worldwide in an interview with Japanese magazine Famitsu.
Around 3.27 million of those sales were in Japan, while sales in the rest of the world have topped 390,000. The game was released on the Switch eShop in the west on 20th October, initially with only Japanese language support, although it has since been updated to feature English, Korea and Chinese.
Suika Game involves matching together similar fruit, which then combine to form another, larger fruit, with the biggest being a watermelon (suika in Japanese). But the wrinkle is that the fruits tend to roll around once dropped, adding an element of unpredictability. It’s incredibly simple, but strangely compelling.
Suika Game was originally developed by the Japanese company Aladdin X for its range of digital projectors, but the firm ported the game to the Switch in 2021 after receiving good feedback from its customers. The game barely made an impact to start with, but after several streamers discovered the game earlier this year, sales have skyrocketed.
In the Famitsu interview, a representative from Aladdin X said that the sudden attention from YouTubers and other was a “surprise”, adding that “I never thought that the content would be loved by so many people” (via Google Translate).
When asked whether the success of Suika Game would prompt the company to focus full-time on the games industry, they replied: “To be honest, we have not established a clear policy at the moment, partly because this topic has been talked about so much in just the past two months. We are currently discussing our future policy within the company. However, our company’s philosophy is that we are not selling ‘projectors’ or ‘games’, but rather that we are ‘providing everyone with a rich space to spend time with their loved ones’.”
The Aladdin X spokesperson added that there was “nothing we can tell you” about development of a smartphone version of Suika Game, but said that: “it is true that we have received requests from customers who want to play the Watermelon Game but are unable to do so. We are currently solidifying our internal policy, keeping in mind how we can deliver the Watermelon Game to as many people as possible, not just the smartphone version.”
More on this quite frighteningly melon-based puzzler as we get it. Charles Bronson once made an action film, 1974’s Mr Majestyk, in which he played a farmer aggressively protecting his watermelon patch. We wonder what he would have made of Watermelon Game.
