Konami Wai Wai Sokoban

Game Overview

Konami has a long history of making mascot crossover video games. In fairness, there aren’t a lot of companies that can pull off that feat. To make a successful mascot game you need to have a lot of mascots at your disposal, ones that are recognizable in their own right, enough so that they can all stand together and feel like equals. Sega has a few, although most of their mascots come from Sonic games. Sony can’t pull off this fear as their few attempts at mascot crossover games, like PlayStation All -Stars Battle Royale, had to borrow characters from other companies to flesh out their rosters. It’s hard to think of many companies outside of Nintendo that have the breadth and depth of characters to be able to populate a mascot game, but Konami is one of the few that could do it, and technically they’ve made a number of these kinds of games in a variety of genres.

Konami has developed a number of different styles of mascot games (again, taking a page from Nintendo’s playbook), from platformers (Konami Wai Wai WorldOne of the stranger games released from Konami on the NES, this title features mascots crossover together in a Metroidvania-style adventure.), to kart racers (Konami Krazy RacersKonami's foray into the mascot kart racing genre, starring many of Konami's heroes and villains, all matching up in a very Super Mario Kart kind of game.), parody games (ParodiusThe first game in what would become Konami's parody mascot space shooter crossover series. Featuring gameplay taking from Gradius and TwinBee, this is s strange, silly, hard-as-nails title released only for the ASCII MSX.), and more. And we can add a Sokoban title to that list as, in 2006, Konami released their own version of the box pushing puzzle game with the (creatively titled) Konami Wai Wai Sokoban. Yes, it’s really just that simple.

Konami Wai Wai Sokoban is, like the name says on the tin, a Sokoban game through and through. In the game – which features Goemon of the Ganbare Goemon series heading to a prestigious university to act as a janitor, pushing around blocks to find treasures and pay off the university’s debt, which is just as silly as it sounds – you, the player, take your character (from a selection of various Konami mascots including Simon BelmontThe first hero of the Castlevania series (by release date), he's been featured in more games, and referenced more times, than almost any other character in the series.) and push boxes around in 500 different puzzles. All from the comfort of your mobile phone.

The game was developed by Konami and published in 2006 for the i-mode platform and Yahoo! Keitai, two services not available in the West. These games didn’t ever make the jump to outside markets in large part because the Japanese phone market did not, for the longest time, have parity with other regions. Japanese phones were, at one point, far more advanced than the phones developed elsewhere, and porting games out to those regions simply wouldn’t have worked. And then, once other phone brands caught up and surpassed what Japan was making, the games for Japanese phones were old enough that porting them out simply didn’t make sense anymore. As such, once everyone moved on, these games became relics of the past.

Because of this, it is actually quite difficult to find much in the way of details about this game online beyond the fact that, yes, it did exist and players could play Sokoban. A couple of screenshots and confirmation of characters is largely all that exists anymore. There aren’t even YouTube videos of the game in action, a rarity for classic media at this point. The old phone platforms are dying or dying (Yahoo! Keitai ended operation in April 2024 while i-mode is closing up shop in 2026) and the old games are dying with it. Even if you could somehow get a copy of Konami Wai Wai Sokoban (which seems unlikely at this point) it’s doubtful you could even get it to run. As such, the game is essentially dead media, lost to time.