It’s a big cultural moment in Japan when a new Monster Hunter game releases, especially when it’s made for portable consoles. Monster Hunter: Rise is one of those, releasing this Friday, March 26th for the Nintendo Switch, then coming later to PC in 2022. One VR / AR game developer in particular, called Mark-on, noticed that so many of its employees had scheduled a vacation day for the game’s release that its CEO is just giving everyone the day off.

He’s commemorating this Friday as “Monster Hunter Holiday,” according to an interview with HuffPost Japan, though he clarified that the holiday is only for “non-executive” employees.

The series has built a much larger global audience since the release of Monster Hunter World, but it’s been popular in Japan for far longer on portable consoles, namely the PSP. My colleague Sam Byford, who’s based in Japan, wrote in 2015 that “it was near-impossible to walk onto a train carriage in Japan between 2008 and 2012 without seeing men, women, and children transfixed by Sony’s little plastic handheld. Many went so far as to contort their fingers into a ‘claw’ to manipulate the awkward camera controls.”