SEGA To Redeem Olympic License For Mario & Sonic??? News

While rumours abound that Mario & Sonic at the Olympic Games 2 is in development, TVG can confirm that the licensee for the International Olympic Committee (International Sports Multimedia) is currently in talks with game publishers regarding the license for the Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympics.

When we asked International Sports Multimedia whether it was in talks with games publishers regarding the official license for Vancouver 2010, the company could confirm that this was the case although it was unable to give any details of the progress of these talks or which publishers were involved.

This follows a string of rumours suggesting that Mario & Sonic at the Olympic Games 2 is in development. Spanish mag Nintendo Accion seemingly floated the story originally, while Eurogamer has cited a source who "knows about this sort of thing" and stated that a sequel with a wintry theme is in the works.

Mario & Sonic at the Olympic Games has been a huge success for publisher SEGA, which originally issued a pre-release forecast of 4 million unit sales worldwide for the title that has been far exceeded by a reported 10 million unit sales as of July last year (and that was before the Olympic Games had even started).

Speaking at around the same time last year, SEGA of America's President Simon Jeffery was quoted as saying, "We would be delighted to do another game with Mario and Sonic." In other words, if the ISM is in discussions with game publishers for Vancouver 2010, then the smart money is on SEGA being at the front of the cue with Mario & Sonic 2.

The current agreement that SEGA has with ISM was originally announced in 2005 and gave SEGA the Olympic license up until 2009, so it would need to extend this license in order to cover Vancouver 2010.