Before Dead Rising and Lost Planet, Inafune was
most well known for his character designs in Mega Man and the original Street Fighter, as well as working a few of the Onimusha titles. Moving forward with Lost Planet, Dead Rising, and
Microsoft,
Inafune shares his perspectives on how video game development today involves designing for a world market in order to be successful, rather than specific territories...
IGN: Is there still a chance that it could succeed in Japan? Is staying with Microsoft beyond Lost Planet and Dead Rising something you're interested in?
Keiji Inafune: Even though I used the past tense by saying they did not succeed, there still of course the possibility in the future. I'm never going to rule anything out. The game market is a tricky business, that's for sure. I guess that, at least with our titles, we knew right from the start.
It's not like Microsoft's brand image for the Xbox was going to go from what it was from the first one to just being some huge success overnight for the 360. No one every even thought that would occur. We all thought that they would, at best, get a slightly larger market share than the first Xbox. Unfortunately, they're doing even worse.
IGN: So, why go with Microsoft?
Keiji Inafune: It's a very basic answer. We got the tools the quickest. They gave us the kits first and there you go. I can have tons of different ideas. I can say I want to make different kinds of cakes, different soufflés, whatever. If they don't give me the pans, the pots, the knives the forks to make it, then I can't make it.
IGN: Have you noticed any particular strengths or weaknesses while working with the 360?
Keiji Inafune: What the
Xbox 360 represents is a great balance. When you think about when it was released, what it can do, how much it costs, the type of games it will have, it's just in a very nice position. The PlayStation 3 being that expensive is going to put it out of the price range of a lot of people, but yet the 360 will still be there. It will still be something that's affordable for enough people. The one disadvantage, unfortunately, is that it did not succeed in Japan.
....the gameplay itself is not something that Japanese people are used to, so they're going to have to adapt to what the new world standards are in games. If not, the Japanese market is going to be in trouble,
because I can guarantee you not just Capcom, other Japanese companies, developers as well, are looking at games on a worldwide scale. They're not just looking at little Japan like before.....
IGN: What's the most impressive thing about E3 you've seen so far?
Keiji Inafune: I just got here, so there's still a lot I haven't seen.
If there was one thing at the show I had to pick up and play, it would be Gears of War.
IGN: Why's that?
Keiji Inafune: It's a title that I view with two different perspectives. One is, just merely as a gamer, it looks cool and I want to play it. It's a game that's got pretty amazing graphics, the motion and
animation, everything's working out quite nicely with that game. The other perspective is, as a creator myself, to see just how far they've been able to push the system in such a short amount of time. L
ost Planet itself has already received a lot of praise from a lot of people for looking like a pretty amazing game that's also pretty spectacular for all the things in it. If we were going to say there's one title that's slightly above us, that has slightly raised the bar above us, it would be Gears of War. We want to see exactly what they're doing and how they're doing it. cont'd...
