Former Nintendo of America spokesman Howard Phillips has been sharing tons of goodies from his personal archives lately, and now he shares a game idea. As the original Nintendo “Gamemaster,” he was tasked with knowing the ins and outs of every single piece of software that released on the NES. His ability to absorb so much information with ease has been a great asset during his career — which includes time spent with Lucasfilm Games and as studio director who oversaw Infinity Blade — and now he would like to impart some of that skill with a new iOS game called Gamemaster Howard’s Know-It-All.
Know-It-All is educational software masked as a tile-matching puzzler. The idea is that any type of trivia category can be incorporated into the game to create something akin to “super flashcards” in order to aid in memory recall. The way the system is set up, literally any topic is up for grabs — in the demo, we see “Marine Insignias,” “Japanese Hiragana,” “Noble Gases,” “Guitar Chords,” and a range of math problems — with more topic sets available for free download. And though the game is limited to iThings now, there are plans to bring it to Android devices, PC, and beyond.
As a cool bonus, there will be a six-part tie-in comic similar in style to Nintendo Power’s Howard & Nester. It’s being drawn by Brawl in the Family‘s Matthew Taranto, who won the partnership opportunity after he made this adorable Nintendo Power tribute comic a few weeks back. You can catch a snippet of Matthew’s contribution in the video above, and you can also see his original strip attached below.
Howard has taken this project to Kickstarter, where he hopes to raise $50,000. Should it garner enough support, Howard will donate copies to various school districts around the country to foster alternative learning methods. Big donators will even receive a custom NES game pak by cartridge artist group 72 Pins. But rewards aside, I would like to see this come to fruition just because I know Howard has the ability to pull off such a project successfully.
