ShiftyLook was an American subsidiary of Bandai Namco Holdings that was focused on revitalizing older Namco franchises, with their first step being video game webcomics based on the company's various franchises. The subsidiary later offered webtoons, anime, playable games, music, message boards, and graphic novels as well. ShiftyLook regularly held substantial exhibitions at large US comics conventions, having a major booth presences and holding large giveaways of promotional merchandise. ShiftyLook shut down on September 30, 2014.
History
ShiftyLook was headed by editor-in-chief Robert Pereyda. The idea behind the company was to revive Namco's more obscure, dormant video game franchises for mediums such as webcomics and animations. Pereyda believed that entertainment formats like webcomics were largely successful, and that if these intellectual properties become popular through them, it could garner more interest in those series and make Namco Bandai interested in creating new games for them. Namco Bandai also believed that ShiftyLook was a venue for content creators to collaborate on projects, and to establish working relations with artists and developers for future projects. In an interview with CRB.com, Pereyda stated: "Basically, what we're doing is taking a look at stuff that's forgotten IPs, stuff that's sleeping, stuff that — just to be honest — some people don't care about and thinking what we can do with it. This is a big system and we know that not everything's going to succeed, but if some of them can make it to the big time, we've done a good job. We're casting a really wide net. We're doing different styles, different artists, different kinds of titles, just filling out a whole matrix of different things we can do and then seeing where that goes." If the webcomics were successful, Pereyda hoped that content such as merchandise and print versions would be available as well.