Ian Bogost - Water Cooler Games - Leapster: Third Party Development after all?

my affiliations

Ian Bogost - videogame theory, criticism, design

about me

contact

Water Cooler Games

Water Cooler Games served as the web's primary forum for "videogames with an agenda" — coverage of the uses of video games in advertising, politics, education, and other everyday activities, outside the sphere of entertainment.

The site was maintained at watercoolergames.org from 2003-2009, where it was edited by myself and Gonzalo Frasca. It is now archived here in full.

You are reading an archived version of this article. The original URL was (loading...)

Leapster: Third Party Development after all?

by Ian Bogost April 13, 2004

categories: Educational Games

I've complained before on WCG (1, 2) about the fact that LeapFrog hasn't opened the Leapster platform to third party developers. Instead, LF apparently develops the titles in-house.

But I just discovered that game studio The Diversion Group out of California appears to have created the Math Baseball Leapster title (playable demo here). What's strange is that the studio just announced its opening this month, but their website dates the release of the Math Baseball title to March 21, 2003, over a year ago.

Anyway, my suspicion is that LeapFrog hired Diversion Group to create this title as work-for-hire rather than under a "normal" developer/publisher relationship. If anyone knows more, please let me know.