Tag Archives: Major League Eating

Fuck the Microsoft press conference. Everyone knows what’s going to happen anyway. What you want, brothers, is to get down to some hardcore virtual gorging. Thanks Christ, then, Mastiff’s confirmed that Major League Eating’s going to be released on WiiWare in the US tomorrow, as you can see from this press release.

“Top level competitive eaters are more than brilliant athletes and tacticians, they are more than fierce competitors,” said Mastiff boss Bill Swartz.

Fantastic.

Want to read some sketchy notes about a really long WiiWare presentation in America? Course you do. IGN live blogged the second day of Nintendo’s Media Summit just in case you do. There’s stuff in there about Strong Bad, World of Goo and the fact Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles and Major League Eating were playable but no one can write about them until next week. Enjoy.

Says so here. It’ll be releasing in the US on May 12 alongside the Wii downloads service. We still don’t know when WiiWare’s going to happen in Europe, however, so there’s no news on when you’re going to be able to pretend to eat buffalo wings really quickly on you TV over here.

Mastiff boss Bill Swartz has given first details of the recently announced Major League Eating game, claiming that we’re going to be “shocked” at the intricacies of trying to eat 50 virtual hotdogs.

“I figured we could do a really good game,” he said. “I read the forums, I know what guys are saying. A lot of people out there seem to think that because it’s Major League Eating, it’s going to be a trivial game, like the whole thing’s going to be button-mashing. Without giving too much away, I think that people are going to be shocked at the depth of play. At the end of the day, our game is really a fighting game with moves, counter-moves, strategy.”

Swartz also explained the reasoning behind being interested in the franchise in the first place. In fact, videogaming247 Quote of the Month Award, February 2008, goes to the following paragraph.

“We started because we wanted a widely-known but under-appreciated – at least in the videogame world – intellectual property,” he said. “In terms of my attraction to Major League Eating and competitive eating in general, I like to think of myself as a civilized person. But I’m also a man, like you. And what’s civilization about? Civilization is about taking the raw impulses of especially young men and putting restrictions on them so you can have a functioning society. If you didn’t have civilization, all we’d have is 12-28 year old guys going around and stealing, raping, killing. So you build this social rules for tens of thousands of years, and you get society, where everyone follows the same rules and so on. That tension between our baser selves and society’s rules has always fascinated me.”

Genius.

According to this, publisher Mastiff has licensed the gaming rights for the Major League Eating franchise in the States. We couldn’t make this next sentence up, so we’re just going to paste it: “Major League Eating, which oversees all top eating events in the nation including the July Fourth hot dog-eating contest, counts among its members Takeru Kobayashi, the Japanese eating phenomenon, and American Joey Chestnut, current champion of the world.”

Pathetic. Major League Eating: The Game (really) has no release date as yet.