http://www.kotaku.com/gaming/top/fea...ats-205466.php
Feature: Inafune On Porn, Halo and Deadly Sacred Floats
By Brian Ashcraft
Tokyo, TGS, and Keiji Inafune is talking about adult videos. We're in a drab conference room somewhere in the drabber Makuhari Messe, and I'm thinking that it wasn't supposed to be this way. The interview had been slated for Capcom HQ in Osaka, then moved to the Roppongi office and finally settling on the Tokyo Game Show. I'm told I should take it, not wait for an interview in Osaka. Vague as to when his schedule will be open.
Understandable. Keiji Inafune is a busy man. This year, he's already brought us one big title (Dead Rising), has another waiting in the wings (Lost Planet), not to mention Onimusha: Dawn of Dreams and overseeing the obligatory Mega Man. We've got an hour together. And right now, he's talking about porn vids.
I'm introduced as "someone who goes to Den Den Town a lot" by Capcom's head of localization, Ben Judd.
"Den-Den Town has totally been overrun with porno stores," Inafune's quick to point out with a smile. "I don't even go there anymore. AV used to mean 'Audio Visual,' but now it means 'Adult Video."
Ben's quick to chime in between the laughter, "Well now you've got your intro: Capcom's Keiji Inafune talks porn."
Informal, down-to-earth and funny as hell, Keiji Inafune is decked out in a Lost Planet shirt with trendy, torn jeans and spiky hair. He looks young—more like someone who would play Mega Man rather than the guy who invented the character.
Born in Kishiwada City, south Osaka prefecture, the producer tells me about an annual fall festival, the Kishiwada Danjiri Matsuri. I've heard of it, but never seen it first hand. Teams race, tugging sacred floats manually at high speed through the city, and every year a least one person perishes. "Last year, the news said at this year's festival, no one died," Inafune says. "That was news. That someone didn't die." Growing up in sleepy, yet traditional Kishiwada, he was interested in art as a child and thought video games would be the best vehicle for people to see his creations.
"I wanted to enter Konami," he tells me with a grin. "But I asked my professor, and he said Konami was a little far, and Capcom was the closest to my house, so I applied first. Good thing I did, otherwise, I'd be working on Mecha-Man Solid 4 at Konami."
Back when Inafune entered Capcom in 1987, the company was staffed by a little more than a hundred employees. He was set to work on a new arcade game, called Street Fighter. "I did a good job, and they wanted me, made me rather, design a new character," he says.
That character was Mega Man. He headed a five person team, and hand drew the characters himself. His goal? "The easiest characters to draw for the Famicon were cute, not realistic. And robots were cute. I wanted to make something better than Astro Boy. I didn't, but I wanted to." Short on time and facing deadlines, the game was slammed together. "We'd be like, 'Guess this is okay for a boss character, huh?'" says Inafune. The result: A hit. "It was a blast," he's telling me. "I was really busy, but it was fun."
While a parade of Mega Man sequels and spin-offs followed, he began working on varied titles. The historical demon combat puzzler Onimusha showed he was willing to mix it up, and eventually reel in big name talent like Jean Reno and Takeshi Kaneshiro for motion capturing in the series' third entry. A shy, young game designer named Shinji Mikami had an idea for a horror game. "I wasn't sure it would sell," Inafune confesses. It did. Called Biohazard (Resident Evil in the West), the game was a smash. The making of the sequel proved demanding with the game actually getting scrapped, remade from the ground up and Inafune eventually coming on to offer assistance. Based on George Romero's zombie films, the game's provide good movie fodder, and Hollywood came a-knocking.
"I love horror films," Inafune gushes. "I've rented a lot of foreign horror films." His heros? John Carpenter ("I adore The Thing). James Cameron ("He's inspired me."). Sam Raimi ("We've met, he's a shy otaku."). And he claims, there's something similar between filmmakers and game creators. "I can't put my finger on it, but there is," he adds. "I guess it's that both make something. I don't ever feel like I want movie star's autographs, but I do want the autographs of people who create."
His games certainly carry the influence of cinema, but do not try to replicate them and stay to what a game actually is. Take Dead Rising, for example. It's clearly inspired by George Romero's Dawn of the Dead, but it's in no way the movie in game form, but something different all together. "We didn't want to copy Dawn of the Dead. We didn't want to do that at all."
It was at a Carl's Jr. hamburger joint in Los Angeles that Inafune first told Ben about a zombie game set in an American shopping mall. The spin was to lace it with black humor like Peter Jackson's early films. "Zombies are funny, because they're so stupid," Inafune says. The game was a smash, garnering positive reviews. The big gripe: Save points were few and far between.
"It's a timed game," he says. "Because the game is timed, we wanted you to remember the mall and the map. If save points were close together, it would be easy. We wanted it to be hard."
Do you know what George Romero thinks of the game?
"No," Inafune says.
Do you want to know?
"No. Actually, I've met George Romero. I've been to his house and met his wife, Christine, who Stephen King named his book Christine after."
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And just as Dead Rising is hitting Japan, he's got another game months away from release—Lost Planet: Extreme Condition. The mech-meets-shooter baffled Capcom execs when Inafune first presented the idea. In fact, they didn't want to make the game.
"I really wanted to do something as cool as Halo. I'm a big Halo fan, but it's not well know in Japan. It's very interesting, but very American. But we wanted to do something that had more of a Japanese flavor. That's why we added robots. In America, mech-type robots are not so cool. Just look at the mechs in The Matrix."
Capcom said it couldn't sell it. It was "just a mech game," but Inafune contested that it wasn't just a mech game. It was his take on Halo. The company balked and said a Halo type game won't sell in Japan. "I told them that I wasn't just making a game for Japan, but for the world." Even getting a flat out rejection, he and his team started working on Lost Planet independently. They had done the same for Dead Rising, and again Inafune persisted and then showed them what they had been doing after the fact. The buildings are separte, so managers aren't able to check everything they do, he says. "When we described the idea, we couldn't get approval," Inafune says smiling. "But, when we showed them what we were working on, we got approval."
The title is the second big exclusive for the Xbox 360, a console that is struggling in Inafune's native Japan. The producer seems to be one of the console's strongest supporters. "The tools are straightforward and on time." he says. "The schedule is clear, Microsoft support's developers and the console wasn't pushed back. I was impressed that Microsoft was able to launch the console on time. For us developers, that's the most important thing. Trust."
I notice during the entire interview, Inafune doesn't look at his cell phone, answer calls, check emails and doesn't even check his watch once. He sits there focused, providing his undivided attention. I ask him how he does it. How do you churn out all these big games? Original games at that.
"My staff. Think about it," Inafune says. "I have a really good staff, so I am able to work on various, different projects. That's what's wrong with Kojima. He's focusing on Metal Gear Solid way too much. And pins everything on that, where he could be working on another interesting, new title. That's why I have a good staff. I can explain the concept, and they can do it. The localization team is great as well. That's why."
Our time is up. Some PR person scurries in, yet Inafune is still talking. He's lingering. Doesn't he have somewhere to go? I wonder.
"You know, when I released Dead Rising, other industry people in Japan asked me where I got that amazing team of foreigners to do the game. 'What do you mean?' I asked. 'The game was a hit in America, you must have gotten some good foreigners.' 'No,' I told them. 'The team that made the game was Japanese.'"
And as soon as he punctuates that sentence, he's off. Ben Judd sees me off. We stop in a corridor. Ben's a big guy with freckles. Out of the corner of my eye, I can see Inafune have a sit down meeting in the lobby on the way to another meeting presumably. Ben tells me I can come by HQ, take some photos. Perhaps, wrangle Inafune for a few minutes, talk in Capcom's Osaka office as originally planned
