Chulip - Development

Development

Chulip was developed by a team of 12 to 14 people at Punchline. The game took two and a half years to complete after its initial planning; one year and three months were devoted to programming. Director Yoshirou Kimura started work on the project as he helped his colleagues at Love-de-Lic finish that company's final game, L.O.L.: Lack of Love. Production of Chulip began in the earliest days of the PS2, making it a challenge for the development team who only had experience with the original PlayStation. Kimura valued his team members opinions and ideas while working on it. "It was challenging and interesting at the same time to program a game for a new console," he stated. "We were definitely eager to see what we could do with it." The original idea for Chulip came when Kimura visited Western countries and saw couples kissing in public, a custom not often performed among Japanese people. Kimura came up with game's title after attending a party in Tokyo. As the intoxicated partygoers talked about video games, they began to humorously say "chu-shite" (lit. "kiss me"). The title Chulip is a play on words: a cross between chu (the Japanese onomatopoeia for the sound of a kiss) and the English word lip.

Kimura eventually spoke with Marvelous Entertainment's Yoshiro Wada about creating a game mixing a "flare of Moon and Japan a little while ago (say about 40 years ago)". Kimura wanted Chulip to be localized to show the world certain aspects of Japanese culture and "all the kind of interesting stuff that you can see every day". He also wanted to display a real, modern truancy problem for Japanese students with the game's cast of underground dwellers. Norikazu Yasunaga designed many of the game's mechanics. According to Kimura, "for efficient procedure, set it up so that the personality and the characteristics for each NPC had to be one-by-one". The character designs were done by Ryuji Nouguchi, who used items from Kimura's personal scrapbook and "made them funny". The musical score to Chulip was composed by Hirofumi Taniguchi, another former member of Love-de-Lic. The soundtrack was released by King Records in Japan on a single disc on November 22, 2002. Songs 35 through 44 represent the "Tsurukame Movie Soundtrack", consisting of music for each of the game's short films, while songs 45 and 46 are bonus tracks.

Publisher Natsume licensed the game for a projected North American release in early 2004. The game was then shown at the Electronic Entertainment Expo that year. Natsume realized early on that it would be an extremely obscure title and thus planned on releasing it at a low retail price. The game was delayed, and Natsume assured that it would be released sometime in 2005. After more delays, Chulip was ultimately released in North America on February 13, 2007, the day before Valentine's Day, exclusively to GameStop stores. The North American version was supposed to feature updated graphics and an "accurately meticulous" translation of Japanese text. Natsume claimed that Punchline's busy schedule resulted in such a long delay for the localization and that it also prevented them from making any graphical changes.