Surely reading the headline you are already making your guesses: Is it ‘Commandos’, or ‘The Abbey of Crime’ in its multiple versions, or maybe the surprise comes from ‘Castlevania: Lords of Shadow’? The solution may disappoint you, but, believe it or not, it’s a Nintendo DS game titled… ‘Imagine Being a Fashion Designer’. There you have it.
You have to imagine it
In October 2007 the Nintendo DS was more than established in the world of video games. The Big N had found the key to appeal to everyone, and with an audience consisting of literally anyone, of course, come games with a previously unheard of audience. It was the perfect moment for Ubisoft to prepare ‘Imagine being a cook’ and ‘Imagine being a mom’, dedicated to a target of stereotypical girls that until then had not had a market niche.
And in this panorama, the Spanish developer Virtual Toys was able to get its hands on two of the games of this first batch of the “Imagine” saga: ‘Imagine being a veterinarian’ and ‘Imagine being a fashion designer‘. We are not going to deceive you: fun, what is fun, it is not, but it fulfills its function perfectly. To the surprise of everyone and no one at the same time, this break with the established was such a bombshell that they sold five million units worldwide. Five. Millions.
Virtual Toys would still launch more games of the franchise, already totally on sale, such as ‘Imagine being an amazon’, ‘Imagine being a presenter: the great fashion contest’ or ‘Imagine being a veterinarian: puppy hospital’. However, its dive in franchises such as ‘Cars 2’, ‘Torrente Online’ or ‘The Muppets: movie adventures’ made that, little by little, the money was going away. In 2016, it went bankrupt after sinking (eeeeeh?) with ‘Pirates: Treasure Hunters’.
For its part, the ‘Imagine Being’ saga culminated in 2013, with versions of its greatest hits (including ‘Imagine Being a Fashion Designer’) for 3DS. Mind you: the DeVuego portal, which broke the news of the game’s five million units sold, later updated its list of biggest Spanish hits and placed it in third place, beaten by ‘Deadlight’ (4,900,000) and ‘RiME’ (4,000,000), leaving Virtual Toys’ game “only” with 2,810,000 units sold worldwide.
We are probably left with, well… Imagining.
