Hello Kitty, that marketing phenomenon from Sanrio, turned 30 years old on November 1st 2004.
In honor of her birthday, THQ Wireless has announced two new Hello Kitty games for mobile devices Hello Kitty Jump Rope and Hello Kitty Park Adventure.
Wireless Gaming Review has a review of Hello Kitty Park Adventure, also called London Adventure at this link. Some comments from WGR include:
Most of the game’s puzzles involve traversing ponds by using a combination of lily pads and floating baskets, which Hello Kitty can move into place. Monkeys will push any blue baskets that get in their ways, but they aren’t strong enough to push red baskets. Hello Kitty is truly the mightiest among anthropomorphic cultural icons. In later levels, new complexities are thrown into the mix, like teleportation booths.
Hello Kitty is an amazing cultural and commercial success, generating nearly $1 billion in revenue each year. Sanrio, the parent company, has licensing agreements with about 1,000 companies worldwide and the cat-with-no-mouth now appears on 22,000 different products and sold in about 40 countries.
Here is a map of the Sanrio locations in the US:
In their 2004 book entitled “Hello Kitty: The Remarkable Story of Sanrio and the Billion Dollar Feline Phenomenon”, authors Ken Belson and Brian Bremner, claim that in the late 1990s, Microsoft chairman Bill Gates offered Sanrio $5.6 billion for the rights to Hello Kitty.
She’s everywhere…
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{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
A billion dollars a year for Hello, Kitty? I wonder how much he/she/it made during those early years.
When did Hello Kitty become super-popular? I hadn’t heard of it until just a few years ago.