go!" was derived from Thunderbirds and the NASA launch sequence. Yano conceived the latter character, who has no Ouendan equivalent, while trying to determine a good motivation for the Agents' service. When it came to choosing songs for the game's setlist, which was planned to comprise twenty songs as opposed to just fifteen in Ouendan, Yano looked for ones that he thought would be ideal to blast in a "college frat party", while making sure that the setlist drew upon multiple genres and time periods. Ultimately, the song count was pared down to 19 for the final release, with one song, "Livin' La Vida Loca", ultimately being omitted due to licensing issues later into development, after previously being hinted to be included in earlier reports from 1UP. According to E3 trailer footage and UI programmer Robert Ota Dieterich, "Livin' La Vida Loca" was originally going to be used for the game's second level, before being replaced with Sum41's "Makes No Difference". When Nintendo initially unveiled the game's setlist, the songs were listed in random order, leading some to initially mistake the final listed song, "Anthem" to be the last song of the game. The game reused Ouendans engine, resulting in a few leftover assets from that game appearing in the demo build presented at E3, such as a wall of fire that rises during long combos and calligraphic pass/fail symbols at the end of mid-level cutscenes. Despite Agents not being a strict localization of Ouendan, the product ID Nintendo assigned the game treated it like one, containing the same game-unique combination of three alphanumeric characters used for Ouendan, "AOS". Reception Upon release, Elite Beat Agents was critically acclaimed, receiving an average score of 87.7% on GameRankings. From the date of its release to November 28, 2006, Agents sold 120,000 copies. Then-president of Nintendo of America Reggie Fils-Aime has stated that while sales were strong, he was disappointed that they were not better, having expected 300,000 copies sold in light of critical acclaim. Only 179,000 copies of the game have been sold in North America by January 2009. Elite Beat Agents won several awards in 2006. It won the Nintendo DS game of the year award from both IGN and from Nintendo Power. IGN gave it several other DS-specific awards, including Best Music Game, Best Artistic Design, Best Story, Most Innovative Design, and Best Licensed Soundtrack. They also awarded its developer,