Microsoft had heard on the grapevine that Shinji Mikami, famed creator of Resident Evil, had grown tired and frustrated with developing for the PlayStation 2, which hadn't even been out a year. There were whispers that Mikami was thinking about moving Resident Evil away from PlayStation. He was looking at Microsoft, preparing to launch the Xbox, and Nintendo, preparing to launch the GameCube. Microsoft saw its chance, and set up a meeting.
Bachus remembers Mikami looking every bit the Japanese rockstar, all mirrored sunglasses and leather jackets. An entourage of hangers on followed him into the Microsoft Japan meeting room.
The meeting was conducted by a member of Microsoft Japan's staff who could speak both English and Japanese. Things began cordially, but soon started to deteriorate. Bachus shifted uneasily in his seat. He could tell from Mikami's body language and tone that he wasn't happy with the answers he was getting. The entire meeting was conducted in Japanese. Notes were passed to Bachus explaining what was going on but all he could do was watch in horror, helpless, as it fell apart. The meeting ended abruptly. Mikami stood, bowed, and left.
Bachus was furious. The translator explained: Mikami had confirmed what Microsoft had heard, that he was frustrated developing for PlayStation 2, which was tough to work with. But his team's bonuses were tied to game sales. He needed a reason, a way to explain the shift away from the wildly successful PlayStation 2, the dominant platform of the time, to the Xbox, which had yet to launch, and which in most Japanese eyes was doomed to failure. “What do you guys have to offer?” he asked, bluntly.
Eventually an exasperated Mikami boiled it down: 'what is your philosophy? Sony says games are entertainment, something larger, fuelled by the Emotion Engine. Nintendo says games are toys, created by the legendary Shigeru Miyamoto, perhaps the greatest game developer of all time. What do you feel?' Microsoft had no answer.
“I almost jumped out the window because we had said repeatedly over and over and over that we aspire to enable games that could be considered to be art, much like film,” Bachus says, “that because of the maturity of the development tools and the APIs and the power of the technology, game developers on Xbox would be able to concentrate on the finesse features that elevated games to being something more than they were otherwise.
“So the guy who reported to me said, 'oh that's so great! I wish that I had known that.' But unfortunately it was too late.”
Bachus flagged down Pat Ohura, the head of Xbox Japan at the time, and told him to jump on the next train to Osaka to salvage the deal. But he was too late. Mikami had already met with Nintendo and pledged Resident Evil to its consoles. “That's why Resident Evil 4 was a Nintendo exclusive and it took a while for it to come to Xbox. That was very frustrating.”
