Mintrocket’s 2023 hit Dave the Diver is a chaotic mix of genres, fusing management and fishing sims with a host of mini games and absolutely absurd plot. The silliness and surprises not only produce a highly engaging game but make it very easy for Mintrocket CEO and game director Jaeho Hwang to keep adding content to it. Since launch, he’s been regularly reaching out to his favorite creators to find ways to bring new characters and challenges into Dave’s strange world.
“We try to be a version of Fortnite,” Hwang told Polygon in a video call. “Our game is set in the ocean, an open space that anyone can visit, so anything can happen, and we have a restaurant that anyone can walk into so it doesn’t feel really strange at all if someone suddenly shows up.”
Hwang traveled to Japan to broker deals to bring two of his favorite properties — Godzilla and Yakuza — into the game. The first add-on for Dave the Diver involved Godzilla retreating to recover in the Blue Hole, the place where Dave catches fish, battles giant monsters, and fraternizes with merfolk. In another content pack, Yakuza’s Ichiban Kasuga arrives at Bancho Sushi and teams up with Dave to fight the shady environmentalist organization Sea Blue.
“When it comes to bringing outside characters into our world, I don’t want to just make them a cameo appearance, but I want to give them some role in the game,” Hwang said. “I said I want to be like Fortnite, but we try to care more about the storyline, so it’s kind of hard for us to bring in characters from different settings like medieval or sci-fi. There are some IPs that I really want to work with, so maybe we should add a time portal to bring them in.”
