C- Warrior
Banned
The video is great, although a lot more information in the text with their interiew with Hideki Kamiya, creator of Resident Evil 2, Devil May Cry, Viewtiful Joe, and Okami.
Hideki Kamiya has created and only created 4 games:
He's batting a thousand (four for four)
RE2 91.7%
DMC 92.5%
VJ 91.4%
Okami 90%
*gamerankings*
http://1up.com/do/feature?pager.offset=0&cId=3152880
(just an extremely small snippet of the interview)
HK = Hideki Kamiya
1UP: Since all of your games have been action games, for your third most influential game, tell us what action game -- besides your own -- that you rate the highest.
HK: Hmm, an amazing action game. Ah! The old Famicom Disc version of Dracula, which was the NES Castlevania in the U.S. Back then when I played it, the amount of detail that went into it, I feel the creator must have had a clear vision of what he wanted to do. Even when I saw the weapon, it wasn't a gun or anything that you'd normally see in a game, it was a whip. Even the stages themselves were becoming a story, you can see the clock tower where Dracula is supposed to be off in the distance. As you progress through, you're actually going into the castle, through the catacombs and waterways, going up and going down. It feels like it's telling a story, there aren't any extraneous elements that are just sitting there. Everything is in its place, and the level of vision the designer had was impressive.
1up: All of the games you've worked on, whether it was Resident Evil 2, or Devil May Cry, or Viewtiful Joe, or Okami, they're all, at their core, action games. Looking back, what would you say is the unifying "Kamiya factor" that defines each one. Meaning, what makes these games Hideki Kamiya games? Define the Kamiya Touch?
HK: I've heard this question before in some ways, where it's suggested that each game has a Kamiya "feel" to it, but I don't think it's anything special that makes it "mine." I'm not doing anything intentional to make it feel like a Kamiya game. However, I do go into the details of the games. I never leave the music up to the music team, for example. I don't say, "Oh, just make some music for this stage." I'll bring in CDs and say that this is the kind of music I want for this kind of scene. So because I don't leave any details out of my sight, I'm able to influence everything.
Since I'm just one guy, that personal touch probably filters into the game from different angles. That Dracula game I mentioned as my favorite action game. You can jump, but you can't change your jump in midair. While I really like that kind of game, that's not the kind of game I want to make. The kind of games I like to make are very responsive, the controller lets you do what you want to do. If you're in [midswing with a sword], but you want to be able to turn around and hit someone else, I want you to be able to do it with the controller, rather than having to endure it while you wait for the animation to finish. So maybe that's part of the Kamiya Touch as well. [...] One thing I do is make the character and what they can do first. For example, rather than making a game and putting a character like Dante in it, I'll make Dante and the fact that he can swing a sword -- jump around and do things like that -- and then build the game and enemies and traps around that, so that it fits the character. You make the character and what he can do first, that way you don't limit him.
1UP: Now I've got this mental image of you in a Japanese movie theater, with a bag of popcorn watching a sad movie, having your moment. I think if there's one thing that definitely defines your games, it's that they're all cool. Not like some Western-designed games that feel forced, that want to be extreme or cool. Like "let's put tattoos or ammo belts on the main character," or "Let's put an EA Trax Limp Bizkit-style rap-rock soundtrack on it." Your games are effortlessly cool. They're... Elvis cool. Even with Capcom's own games. Devil May Cry. Cool. Devil May Cry 2 [which Kamiya didn't work on] felt like they were trying too hard. Even with Okami, she's a wolf, but she's the coolest wolf you've ever played in a game. It feels genuinely cool. What's your idea of cool, since it finds its way into your games?
HK: I feel the same way, with Western games where they feel like the designers were trying too hard. I get that feeling from them, and it goes back to that whole "logical versus feeling" way of making games. If you set out trying to make a character cool, it's not going to be cool because it's not natural, because you have to put stuff like a tattoo on to make it cool. If you look at Viewtiful Joe, he's this dude in red tights and a helmet. If you look at him naturally, he's not cool. But I wasn't trying to make him cool. I was trying to make him a fun character to play with, and that's probably why he's cool.
1up: [Focus Groups?]
HK: I think the whole focus-group thing is not the way to make a game, because you start to bring in other people's opinions and lose some of the originality. For Viewtiful Joe, we brought in some kids to a focus test and asked them, "What do you think of the characters?" And all the kids said, "Oh, his head's too big," or "Silvia's annoying, I just want to kill her." They were just trashing the game, so I just got pissed off and said I'm not changing anything.
1UP: So you don't have kids, I take it?
HK: No kids yet, but I'm going to have one soon at the end of the year. A little girl.
1UP: Okami was developed as a stand-alone game, but hopefully, if both Europe and North America buy the game in droves, would you give Amaterasu another shot and do a sequel?
HK: I feel like these games that I've made, Devil May Cry, Viewtiful Joe, Okami, these are all my babies. If there was a sequel, I'd definitely like to be the one doing it, it's like my child, so I'd like to see it grow. If there is a chance to make another Okami, I'd love the chance.
1UP: So you say that you've never had a chance to work on one of your own sequels. Was this a result of you wanting new challenges and deciding not to work on your own sequels, or was it an order issued from managerial types at Capcom for you to work on something else while someone else worked on a sequel?
HK: It's never been my decision where I said, "I don't want to make a sequel," and move on to something new. In my heart, I wish that either I could make the sequel, or that no sequel would be made at all. I don't want anybody else to touch it, it's like my baby. Devil May Cry 2 as an example, it didn't do so well. It's not that people can't live up to my expectations or anything like that.
1UP: I hated it. [Laughs]
HK: It's just that I'm the one that created it, so I want to be able to follow-up with it. It's like if you have a girlfriend, you either want to be dating her, or you don't want to see her with another guy. Whether she's happier or sadder like that, you just don't want to see her with another guy. You have this game, you created it, and of course you want to nurture it yourself.
1UP: If you could turn the clock back, knowing what you know now, what game -- if you could -- with the technology that you have now, the know-how you have now, which game would you do a sequel to now?
HK: Difficult question. Even if I'd turned back the clock, I know that these sequels have already existed at some point, so it kind of made me lose my interest in it, so it's kind of hard to decide. But personally, the shock of Devil May Cry 2 not being made by me was the biggest surprise. By the time Viewtiful Joe 2 was being made, I was already used to the shock of having a sequel done by someone else, but with DMC2 it was a big deal.
1UP: Were you hurt by that, or were you working on another project when Capcom came to you and said, "Hey, we're doing a sequel to DMC?"
HK: It was a pretty big shock, so what was happening at the time was we were finishing up the localization on Devil May Cry for other territories, like North America and other last minute details, when a planner from another group came down to talk to me and said, "Can you show me the scenario and design doc for the first game?" And I asked why, and he said, "Because I'm making the second one." I was thinking, "I can't make the second game? What's going on here?" I was almost afraid of getting fired.
Devil May Cry originally started out as Resident Evil 3, but it turned into DMC because it was so different, and we lost a year of development time. So I thought maybe I was screwing things up and that Capcom wanted to fire me, which would explain why I couldn't do DMC2, because the news came as such a surprise to me.
1UP: I'm amazed that Capcom wouldn't know to keep you on the series. I remember getting my hands on the first Devil May Cry at Capcom's Sunnyvale offices in California, and I was just blown away by it. It's still one of the best games on the PlayStation 2. It's surprising that they would fail to recognize where the talent was when green-lighting the sequel.
HK: From a company perspective, I can imagine how they would think about it. From their perspective, they don't just want to have an intellectual property that relies on one person forever, they want to be able to balance it out and probably have multiple people who can make the game. They probably envision that when they're selling the product, and it doesn't matter who makes it. They might have had that in mind. They didn't realize though that DMC1 was DMC1 because of the people who worked on it. Rather, it's just a product to whomever can make the second one. It was probably a bit of a mistake there.
If you think about movies and things, and you have a movie with a famous director, and the second one changes to a different director, people start wondering, "Uh oh, what's happening here? Will the second one be as good?" But with videogames, when the director doesn't return for the follow-up, those same switches turn off. As long as people see a "2" on the game, they think it'll be the same as "1." I'd love for gamers to look at the games more carefully and realize who's making them. That would help a lot.
(anyway there's a lot more at the link to 1up -- it was a 3 hour interview indeed)
Hideki Kamiya has created and only created 4 games:
He's batting a thousand (four for four)
RE2 91.7%
DMC 92.5%
VJ 91.4%
Okami 90%
*gamerankings*
http://1up.com/do/feature?pager.offset=0&cId=3152880
(just an extremely small snippet of the interview)
HK = Hideki Kamiya
1UP: Since all of your games have been action games, for your third most influential game, tell us what action game -- besides your own -- that you rate the highest.
HK: Hmm, an amazing action game. Ah! The old Famicom Disc version of Dracula, which was the NES Castlevania in the U.S. Back then when I played it, the amount of detail that went into it, I feel the creator must have had a clear vision of what he wanted to do. Even when I saw the weapon, it wasn't a gun or anything that you'd normally see in a game, it was a whip. Even the stages themselves were becoming a story, you can see the clock tower where Dracula is supposed to be off in the distance. As you progress through, you're actually going into the castle, through the catacombs and waterways, going up and going down. It feels like it's telling a story, there aren't any extraneous elements that are just sitting there. Everything is in its place, and the level of vision the designer had was impressive.
1up: All of the games you've worked on, whether it was Resident Evil 2, or Devil May Cry, or Viewtiful Joe, or Okami, they're all, at their core, action games. Looking back, what would you say is the unifying "Kamiya factor" that defines each one. Meaning, what makes these games Hideki Kamiya games? Define the Kamiya Touch?
HK: I've heard this question before in some ways, where it's suggested that each game has a Kamiya "feel" to it, but I don't think it's anything special that makes it "mine." I'm not doing anything intentional to make it feel like a Kamiya game. However, I do go into the details of the games. I never leave the music up to the music team, for example. I don't say, "Oh, just make some music for this stage." I'll bring in CDs and say that this is the kind of music I want for this kind of scene. So because I don't leave any details out of my sight, I'm able to influence everything.
Since I'm just one guy, that personal touch probably filters into the game from different angles. That Dracula game I mentioned as my favorite action game. You can jump, but you can't change your jump in midair. While I really like that kind of game, that's not the kind of game I want to make. The kind of games I like to make are very responsive, the controller lets you do what you want to do. If you're in [midswing with a sword], but you want to be able to turn around and hit someone else, I want you to be able to do it with the controller, rather than having to endure it while you wait for the animation to finish. So maybe that's part of the Kamiya Touch as well. [...] One thing I do is make the character and what they can do first. For example, rather than making a game and putting a character like Dante in it, I'll make Dante and the fact that he can swing a sword -- jump around and do things like that -- and then build the game and enemies and traps around that, so that it fits the character. You make the character and what he can do first, that way you don't limit him.
1UP: Now I've got this mental image of you in a Japanese movie theater, with a bag of popcorn watching a sad movie, having your moment. I think if there's one thing that definitely defines your games, it's that they're all cool. Not like some Western-designed games that feel forced, that want to be extreme or cool. Like "let's put tattoos or ammo belts on the main character," or "Let's put an EA Trax Limp Bizkit-style rap-rock soundtrack on it." Your games are effortlessly cool. They're... Elvis cool. Even with Capcom's own games. Devil May Cry. Cool. Devil May Cry 2 [which Kamiya didn't work on] felt like they were trying too hard. Even with Okami, she's a wolf, but she's the coolest wolf you've ever played in a game. It feels genuinely cool. What's your idea of cool, since it finds its way into your games?
HK: I feel the same way, with Western games where they feel like the designers were trying too hard. I get that feeling from them, and it goes back to that whole "logical versus feeling" way of making games. If you set out trying to make a character cool, it's not going to be cool because it's not natural, because you have to put stuff like a tattoo on to make it cool. If you look at Viewtiful Joe, he's this dude in red tights and a helmet. If you look at him naturally, he's not cool. But I wasn't trying to make him cool. I was trying to make him a fun character to play with, and that's probably why he's cool.
1up: [Focus Groups?]
HK: I think the whole focus-group thing is not the way to make a game, because you start to bring in other people's opinions and lose some of the originality. For Viewtiful Joe, we brought in some kids to a focus test and asked them, "What do you think of the characters?" And all the kids said, "Oh, his head's too big," or "Silvia's annoying, I just want to kill her." They were just trashing the game, so I just got pissed off and said I'm not changing anything.
1UP: So you don't have kids, I take it?
HK: No kids yet, but I'm going to have one soon at the end of the year. A little girl.
1UP: Okami was developed as a stand-alone game, but hopefully, if both Europe and North America buy the game in droves, would you give Amaterasu another shot and do a sequel?
HK: I feel like these games that I've made, Devil May Cry, Viewtiful Joe, Okami, these are all my babies. If there was a sequel, I'd definitely like to be the one doing it, it's like my child, so I'd like to see it grow. If there is a chance to make another Okami, I'd love the chance.
1UP: So you say that you've never had a chance to work on one of your own sequels. Was this a result of you wanting new challenges and deciding not to work on your own sequels, or was it an order issued from managerial types at Capcom for you to work on something else while someone else worked on a sequel?
HK: It's never been my decision where I said, "I don't want to make a sequel," and move on to something new. In my heart, I wish that either I could make the sequel, or that no sequel would be made at all. I don't want anybody else to touch it, it's like my baby. Devil May Cry 2 as an example, it didn't do so well. It's not that people can't live up to my expectations or anything like that.
1UP: I hated it. [Laughs]
HK: It's just that I'm the one that created it, so I want to be able to follow-up with it. It's like if you have a girlfriend, you either want to be dating her, or you don't want to see her with another guy. Whether she's happier or sadder like that, you just don't want to see her with another guy. You have this game, you created it, and of course you want to nurture it yourself.
1UP: If you could turn the clock back, knowing what you know now, what game -- if you could -- with the technology that you have now, the know-how you have now, which game would you do a sequel to now?
HK: Difficult question. Even if I'd turned back the clock, I know that these sequels have already existed at some point, so it kind of made me lose my interest in it, so it's kind of hard to decide. But personally, the shock of Devil May Cry 2 not being made by me was the biggest surprise. By the time Viewtiful Joe 2 was being made, I was already used to the shock of having a sequel done by someone else, but with DMC2 it was a big deal.
1UP: Were you hurt by that, or were you working on another project when Capcom came to you and said, "Hey, we're doing a sequel to DMC?"
HK: It was a pretty big shock, so what was happening at the time was we were finishing up the localization on Devil May Cry for other territories, like North America and other last minute details, when a planner from another group came down to talk to me and said, "Can you show me the scenario and design doc for the first game?" And I asked why, and he said, "Because I'm making the second one." I was thinking, "I can't make the second game? What's going on here?" I was almost afraid of getting fired.
Devil May Cry originally started out as Resident Evil 3, but it turned into DMC because it was so different, and we lost a year of development time. So I thought maybe I was screwing things up and that Capcom wanted to fire me, which would explain why I couldn't do DMC2, because the news came as such a surprise to me.
1UP: I'm amazed that Capcom wouldn't know to keep you on the series. I remember getting my hands on the first Devil May Cry at Capcom's Sunnyvale offices in California, and I was just blown away by it. It's still one of the best games on the PlayStation 2. It's surprising that they would fail to recognize where the talent was when green-lighting the sequel.
HK: From a company perspective, I can imagine how they would think about it. From their perspective, they don't just want to have an intellectual property that relies on one person forever, they want to be able to balance it out and probably have multiple people who can make the game. They probably envision that when they're selling the product, and it doesn't matter who makes it. They might have had that in mind. They didn't realize though that DMC1 was DMC1 because of the people who worked on it. Rather, it's just a product to whomever can make the second one. It was probably a bit of a mistake there.
If you think about movies and things, and you have a movie with a famous director, and the second one changes to a different director, people start wondering, "Uh oh, what's happening here? Will the second one be as good?" But with videogames, when the director doesn't return for the follow-up, those same switches turn off. As long as people see a "2" on the game, they think it'll be the same as "1." I'd love for gamers to look at the games more carefully and realize who's making them. That would help a lot.
(anyway there's a lot more at the link to 1up -- it was a 3 hour interview indeed)