A while ago we made a drawing contest. The goal for us was to let everyone else do the hard creative work, while we just sit back and enjoy the fruits of it. We wanted people to send in drawings of Max in crazy situations – or what they wish was in the game, and it turns out CHILDREN ARE CRAZY!!! Our creativity is the equivalent of an insurance salesman, when we compare with what these kids have come up with.

The winner of the contest is a genious named Oskar Eno Dejgaard from Slangerup and he drew the picture above – click it to get a better view. Here’s a quick outline of how I understand this work of art.
Max is being dragged to sea, tied up by a number of birds and making a green fart. Underneath him and the surface of the water, a lasagna car is chasing a beer truck. The driver of the lasagna car is smashing his front window with a cup of coffee. The coffee is so hot it is on fire. I am guessing the round things between the car and the truck are some sort of doughnuts coming off the beer truck in front?
However, my favorite detail is the bird on the left. I can’t really make out if it is drinking or puking in the toilet attached to Max’s leg.

Oskar, we love you and your drawing – please make us another one…
Oh, and by the way, the Wii is coming your way. Give us a call or send us an email then we’ll figure out the details.
Happy summer everyone!

A small sample of the competition entries…

Important stuff first: Max & the Magic Marker debuts on Steam RIGHT NOW! So everyone out there waiting for this, go nuts and buy it now

The Steam version includes the latest update (1.04) to the PC and Mac versions of the game. It is of course also available right here. Enjoy!

On the WiiWare side of things Rakugaki Hero launched in Japan in mid April as part of cool publisher Marvelous’ World Game Parade initiative. Seeing the game out in Japan is a childhood dream come true for us and we are very excited about it. If you are from Japan – go get it in the WiiWare shop right away and become our friend.

What else? Best Nordic Childrens Game 2010! It is true – Max won the award at the Nordic Game Conference in Sweden two weeks ago. Awesome Trials HD went with the “Best Game” award – something they deserved badly for that incredibly addicting game!

In general we had a really great conference. Klaus and Lasse presented the lovely “Bob Came in Pieces” on the “Indie Night” and the Ludosity guys humorously demonstrated how good Max is – for drawing dicks.

Thanks to Copenhagen Game Collective for a great night and Ludosity for great fun! At the very same conference I personally had the pleasure of cutting up the business model for Max in the official Post-Mortem – thanks to everyone listening in on that, feel free to email me questions

Just to make our party better, the Nordic Game Program awarded us 67.000 Euro for our next project, of which I can’t say anything yet – except that it is going to be something with tentacles… Many thanks for that!

That was all for now, hopefully it won’t be long before we post again!

It fixes many bugs and we really think it plays a lot better than the previous. We hope you all will download and enjoy the patch from our update site and again we apologize for the inconvenience that it may have caused!

Please keep on reporting bugs (if you see them) – it is valuable to us and the quality of the game.

As our friends on facebook already know, we have made a new demo.
Some people found the first one too hard, so this time the plan is to start easy and take it from there.  We hope you like it…



Max up your website
If you are the proud administrator of a homepage on the World Wide internet Web, and you would like to have Max running on it, please let us know. We would be more than happy to let you host the demo too.
If anyone would like to get a stand-alone version of the demo, go get at www.maxandthemagicmarker.com/maxdemo/max_demo_pc.zip.
ENJOY!

This has been a great week! We were nominated for the sponsorprize at IGF, the D2D Vision Award, and to our big surprise we won it!
We really had no expectations when we sat down at the award ceremony. The other nominees were some pretty impressive titles – Nyxquest, which is already out, Joe Danger which is just amazing, and of course everyone’s darling Super Meat Boy. But Max came out on top!

Anyway we were lucky enough to be seated at the ceremony at the same table as our friends from Playdead who are making the amazing black/white game Limbo. We reside in the same building and eat lunch with them pretty much every day, so this was “just” another day at the office until the awards started coming. Limbo was nominated in the main categories of “Best Visual Design” and “Technical Excellence”, and much deserved they won both – it is an awesome game! Then it was our turn, and as mentioned we were victorious and then everyone was happy. We had a great night in San Francisco celebrating. This was truly a great day for Pilestræde 45, and for Danish game development in general. Hoorray!

The European Update
And then more good news: Finally we have an update ready for the European WiiWare version.
As some of you have noticed, there were a few bugs in the initial European version. They have been addressed and we apologise for the annoyance they may have caused. Please update your version through WiiWare and enjoy!

Like so many Europeans before him Max has travelled West in search of new frontiers, gold and glory. And today he finally reached his destination arriving on WiiWare in the Americas. The game can now be purchased from connected Wii’s all over the continent.

Max and all of us here at Press Play thank all our American followers for your awesome dedication and patience. We really hope you will enjoy the game!

Now go shopping

This is a bit late, but we have been terribly busy getting ready for the US release on March 8.

Anyway, last friday we had the honour of recieving the award for Talent of the year at the Danish Game Awards. Mikkel and Lasse were attending the show, and as far as I know they had quite a night.

Also Max & the Magic Marker is nominated for the IGF, D2D Vision Award. We are very proud of this, as the competition is pretty impressive. The winners will be announced at the GDC on March 11.

Wish us luck!

It’s been an exciting day here at the Nintendo Media Summit in San Francisco. A lot of games were announced and they introduced a new Nintendo DS XL, but more importantly they revealed that Max & the Magic Marker will launch in North America on March 8′th.

Oooohhh, Exciting!

Love from San Francisco!

PC version to launch in German stores on Feb. 23rd

One week from now – on Tuesday the 23rd – Max & the Magic Marker will escape his downloadable neighborhood and jump into real world stores around Germany, Austria and Switzerland.

He is brought there by German publisher TGC -The Games Company, who hopefully will be adding more countries very soon. Followers of Max would remember this was already announced several weeks ago – but now there is a date and everything.

Also, we updated the review list – some nice new reviews has been added.

This and eventual future updates to the game can be found on maxandthemagicmarker.com/updates/

WiiWare version: Some of you are also asking about fixes to the bugs that are in the Wii build. We are eager to fix these bugs as well, but as patching is not so common on WiiWare, we can’t really give any time frame on this, but we are working on it. Also we can say that they have been fixed in the US build as well as in the Japanese build, as announced Thursday.

Have a nice saturday!