In the TGS trailer, it was revealed that Square Enix was collaborating with a little known developer named Hexa Drive to develop the new Parasite Eve title The 3rd Birthday on the PSP. Before this news, the only title of note that Hexa Drive has worked on was the Rez HD port on XBLA. What attracted S-E to pick this developer for their project? It seems Hexa Drive has quite an interesting legacy...
Hexa Drive was started on in Feb 2007 by Masakazu Matsushita. Before forming his own little development studio in Osaka, he worked at Capcom. He was a programmer on many of Capcom's arcade titles. He also worked on the main programming of Power Stone 2 and Devil May Cry 3, and most recently was the lead programmer and project manager of Lost Planet on the 360. After Lost Planet shipped, he left Capcom and formed his own company.
The Hexa Drive official blog states that the collaboration for The 3rd Birthday is a marriage between Square Enix's expertise in worldview setting and graphical production, and Hexa Drive's knowledge in the development of action games and programming skills. It's now no longer a surprise to me that S-E picked them to work on a game that Nomura has described as a third person shooter mixed with RPG elements. Matsushita's experience on Lost Planet should no doubt ensure that the game has a solid game engine and runs really well, now we just need to hope that the game design doesn't blow chunks like DoC FFVII did.
Sources:
http://hexadrive.jp
http://hexadrive.sblo.jp/
http://www.mobygames.com/developer/sheet/view/developerId,148387/
http://plusd.itmedia.co.jp/games/articles/0807/31/news003.html
Hexa Drive was started on in Feb 2007 by Masakazu Matsushita. Before forming his own little development studio in Osaka, he worked at Capcom. He was a programmer on many of Capcom's arcade titles. He also worked on the main programming of Power Stone 2 and Devil May Cry 3, and most recently was the lead programmer and project manager of Lost Planet on the 360. After Lost Planet shipped, he left Capcom and formed his own company.
The Hexa Drive official blog states that the collaboration for The 3rd Birthday is a marriage between Square Enix's expertise in worldview setting and graphical production, and Hexa Drive's knowledge in the development of action games and programming skills. It's now no longer a surprise to me that S-E picked them to work on a game that Nomura has described as a third person shooter mixed with RPG elements. Matsushita's experience on Lost Planet should no doubt ensure that the game has a solid game engine and runs really well, now we just need to hope that the game design doesn't blow chunks like DoC FFVII did.
Sources:
http://hexadrive.jp
http://hexadrive.sblo.jp/
http://www.mobygames.com/developer/sheet/view/developerId,148387/
http://plusd.itmedia.co.jp/games/articles/0807/31/news003.html