GEMINI PROJECT

Title: Gemini Project Genre: adventure (?) Developed by: Heavy Cat Multimedia Ltd. Site: closed Year: 2003 Platform: -

"Gemini Project" is a cancelled project of developing and a releasing a commercial Sailor Moon video game by American company Heavy Cat Multimedia Ltd.

During 2003 the company created a promotion video (11 minutes) of the game to present to copyright holders of Sailor Moon in USA. However, when later Sailor Moon has gone off the air in the country, and Heavy Cat Multimedia Ltd. did not see a commercial potential in the game any more, the project was cancelled. The video is lost (clips from it were formerly available at the company's website), no other materials were ever published. The company itself was closed as well and has gone out of game development business.

Below is content of the final update on the company's website before it was shut down:

"April 7th, 2004
Although we believe there will eventually be an opportunity to build and market a Sailor Moon® video game, it is clear that this particular project cannot be moved into production in a practical amount of time. Several of the companies and investors we originally presented this project to are no longer likely to be interested, given the fact it has been many months since we have seen any progress at all.
Also, Sailor Moon is no longer being marketed in the English-language market, and without the support of at least one major retail category: DVD, animated feature, television series or licensed merchandise, it will make what is already a difficult project into an impossible project. According to our best estimates, we would have to raise three times a normal development budget to help a publisher offset the cost of marketing the game. This presents a very difficult problem. Investors are unlikely to support such a budget, and publishers are unlikely to support the project without such a budget. Additionally, it would be holiday season 2006 at the earliest before we could make the game available at retail, provided we moved Gemini into production tomorrow morning.
With such a budget, we would need between 500,000 and one million unit sales for the project to make any sense at all to a publisher. Only nine games had over a million unit sales last year, so this isn't as easy as it sounds.
There has been some amusement lately about suggestions that this isn't a real project, and that we haven't really been working on a video game. This company and our associated companies have invested over 4000 hours of work in these projects building presentations and game designs. To date, we have zero revenue from Tranquility or Gemini. We invested a massive amount of work and did our best to build and market a Sailor Moon® video game.
We are thinking about putting some of our research information into an article about Sailor Moon® along with some interesting facts about the success of the series. We're not sure exactly how to publish such an article, but there may be some opportunities available soon.
In the meantime, once again, we would all like to express our gratitude to the many people who participated in our surveys and who have supported this project over the past months. We certainly hope that Sailor Moon® returns to the English-language market soon, and we will definitely consider a new video game project if there is an opportunity. Thanks again, everyone.
This is Gemini II, signing off."