BitSummit, held every July in Kyoto, is Japan's leading trade show for independent video games. Kyoto is the headquarters of Nintendo, the creators of Super Mario, The Legend of Zelda and many other famous video games.
Masahiko Murakami, one of the leading people of the fair, officially invited the Games Croatia project to be a partner of the fair. Representatives were sent in collaboration with the PISMO Incubator and the Croatian Audiovisual Center Benjamin Noah Maričak, in charge of video games and new technologies in the HAVC Director's Office, and Mateja Olujić, 3D video game artist Go Home Annie, who promoted the Croatian video game industry at the Games Croatia stand.
The participants of the fair expressed great satisfaction when playing the video game Go Home Annie, and Japanese media were also present who tried the video game and published reviews about it. In addition to Croatian video games, other aspects of the Croatian video game industry were also promoted. For example, the past efforts and successes of the state in the development of the video game sector, such as the co-financing of the development and production of video games by HAVC, and the past work of Incubator PISMO as one of the best examples of incubators for video games in all of Europe, and the construction of their new gaming campus.
"Many meetings were held at the fair: with publishers, investors, representatives of educational institutions for video games, representatives of other world fairs, marketing and PR agencies for video games, Japanese independent video game producers, media, etc. The contacts that were made will greatly help the positioning of the Croatian video game industry and domestic video games on the Japanese and Asian markets," said Benjamin Noah Maricak.
The Bitsummit trade fair was founded at the end of 2012 to give independent video game producers the opportunity to present their video games to the world. Over the years, the fair has hosted many prominent guests from major companies such as Sony, Nintendo, SEGA, Bandai Namco, Valve (aka Steam), etc. With the support of leading video game manufacturers and publishers, BitSummit has established itself as one of the leading video game fairs in Asia.
The Games Croatia project is a Croatian audiovisual center launched to promote and develop the Croatian video game industry at the Croatian and international level. The initiative brings together the key stakeholders of the Croatian video game industry, and the project is supported by the Cluster of Croatian Video Game Producers (CGDA), Reboot, Incubator PISMO, the HU-IZ-VI Association and the Croatian eSport Savez (HeSS).
Go Home Annie is a video game from video game producer Misfit Village and main author A young Bosniak, and was created within the PISMO Incubator in Novska. The video game received production funds from HAVC, at the Public Call for Video Game Development and Production in 2021. The story of the game is horror-themed, set in the Žumberačka Mountains, where the player in the role of the protagonist Annie works in a secret facility for testing replicas of paranormal events. The release of the game was announced at the end of 2024 for personal computers and consoles.
Cover photo: Benjamin Noah Maričak and Mateja Olujić at BitSummit 2024.
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