Fans have been drawn to the colorful flavor of the Cooking Mama franchise ever since the first game was released for the DS in 2006. Dishing out meals alongside Mama has never been a particularly meaty experience, but the behind-the-scenes drama surrounding her latest entree, Cooking Mama: Cookstar for the Nintendo Switch, is definitely getting a little spicy.
I’d apologize for all those food puns, but trust me, you’re going to be hungry for more by the end of this.
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Cooking Mama: Cookstar was first announced last year by publisher Planet Entertainment (then known as Planet Digital Partners). They revealed that a new Vegetarian Mode was in the works for Mama, but they also said the game would feature “innovative gameplay” powered by “blockchain technology.”
Blockchain is the same recordkeeping software that powers cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum, and fans were understandably confused about how it could be integrated into Cooking Mama. The press release wasn’t much help, promising that blockchain would be used for everything from DRM to procedurally-generated recipes to keeping cheaters out of online events to paying players for playing the game.
Sometime after the announcement, the press release was quietly removed from Planet’s website, but a copy was archived by the Internet Archive:
“Gaming is a $135 billion dollar industry with little opportunity to invest outside of the large public game publishers. We are using blockchain to add new innovative gameplay that investors can now have equity in,” said Steve Grossman, President of Planet Digital Partners. “Putting aspects of Cooking Mama on-chain will take the user experience to a whole new level, reinvigorate a popular game franchise that many grew up with and give investors an opportunity to make handsome returns, through a digital preferred share offering.”
Video Game Publisher Planet Digital Partners Putting “Cooking Mama” on the Blockchain
All was quiet until this past February, when the publisher inadvertently uploaded a trailer for the game with a March 2020 release date tagged onto the end. But even after the leak, the trailer was never released through an official channel, and things got stranger as March turned into April.
On March 26, the publisher told everyone that Cooking Mama: Cookstar was “Available Now,” but IGN‘s Joe Skrebels ran into a little trouble when he sought to obtain a copy for himself a week later. Skrebels found that the game wasn’t available to download from the Nintendo eShop, even though it had been added to the online storefront on March 31 (albeit for just a few hours):
In short, this is all a bit of a mess, and a contingent of fans across social media are becoming vocal about how very unusual this situation has become. The few people that have been able secure a copy have been able to upload images and videos of the game. As you’d expect, it looks like just another Cooking Mama game – nothing about what I’ve seen suggests that it’s broken, offensive, or any other quality that could cause this level of confusion, silence and general oddity.
The Cooking Mama Game for Switch That Came Out, and Then Disappeared
Joking that Cooking Mama: Cookstar was “Schrödinger’s Video Game,” Skrebels further uncovered multiple odd dead ends when researching the game’s creation, including the discovery that Planet’s “headquarters” is actually just a small suburban home.
All this weirdness helped fuel new rumors that the game was removed from store shelves (both physical and digital) because it hijacked your Internet connection and used your Switch to mine for Bitcoins. A spokesman for Planet Entertainment denied these rumors on Twitter, saying the publisher explored using blockchain technology in the game (which we know from the earlier press release), but that they ultimately never implemented it in the copies of Cookstar that were released.
But about that…
Office Create, the creator of the Cooking Mama franchise, countered Planet’s response with a Legal Notice stating that the version of Cooking Mama: Cookstar released to the public didn’t meet their approval. After testing the “final” build of the game, they requested that “a wide range of deficiencies affecting the overall feel, quality and content of the game” would need to be fixed before it could be released:
In August 2018, Office Create licensed Planet to develop the Cooking Mama: Cookstar game for Nintendo Switch™. Unfortunately, the quality of the game builds failed to meet the standards that our customers expect and deserve. Office Create rejected a wide range of deficiencies affecting the overall feel, quality and content of the game. Yet, despite being contractually obligated to correct the identified deficiencies and resubmit the corrected game for Office Create’s approval, Planet proceeded to release Cooking Mama: Cookstar without addressing all of the rejections and without Office Create’s approval.
Re: Unauthorized Release of Cooking Mama: Cookstar by Planet Entertainment LLC
Planet responded to this accusation on Twitter, claiming that this request wasn’t part of their original contract with Office Create, and that they were within their rights to publish the game:
So where do we go from here? I have no idea. But I do know that if you own a copy of Cooking Mama: Cookstar, you should probably store it someplace safe. It’s going to be a sought-after collectible someday.