TOKYO: Inafune, the former Capcom executive who designed the iconic 8-bit Mega Man character, isn’t just trying to put out quality games. He’s hoping that he can lead the Japanese game industry back to its former glory, by example.
“My energy, my essence of me being Japanese and putting these ideas into what will hopefully be a global success is what I’m hoping will stir more energy, more positive vibes… in our game development community back home,” he said at last week’s E3 Expo. “In small ways I’m trying to trigger and influence and affect our creation and development community so that we can be that healthy, strong, energetic, aspirational Japanese development community that we feel like there once was.”
Inafune made some waves years back when he bluntly criticized the state of the Japanese game industry, noting that it had fallen from the prestigious place it once occupied in the global gaming market. You need only to look at this year’s E3 Expo, he says, to show the validity of his comments.
“We’re here at E3. If you took the number of Japanese creations, games made by Japanese teams, you may be able to—we’re talking about highlights—count them in one hand,” he said. “If you think about the years before that, maybe half of E3 highlights… we had enough healthy Japanese games making those lists.”
“We’re still struggling,” he says. “That voice is still very small.”
One of those rare big and impactful E3 announcements coming from Japanese developers was in part from Inafune himself. His new company Concept is teaming with Austin, Texas-based Armature Studio to create Recore, an action-adventure game published by Microsoft for Xbox One. It was revealed to great audience reception at Microsoft’s big media blitz last week, with an intriguing trailer starring a girl and her robot dog, exploring futuristic ruins in a vast desert.
Armature Studio’s founders were some of the key creatives on Nintendo’s acclaimed Metroid Prime series. These, too, were collaboration between East and West, blending the first-person shooting popular in America with an unmistakeably Nintendo-trademark attention to detail, pacing, and variety.
“There are some parallels” to Metroid in Recore, says Armature’s Mark Pacini. “It’s definitely not a linear-type game; the world changes, so exploration is a very big party of it. As the sandstorms roll in and roll out, things will get covered and uncovered… It’s not just fast-paced combat, it’s not just plat forming, it’s not just exploration—it’s a good meld of all of those things.”
“I think it’s safe to say that Xbox, the platform, does have a type of association [with] a lot of heavy combat-based, shooting-based image built into many of the successful franchises,” Inafune says. “I’m hoping that this will give a new sense, a fresher take on, oh, I can also enjoy different types of games on Xbox.”
Collaborating with Western developers is an important way forward for Japanese-flavored games, Inafune says. “The core idea for Recore came from our own Japanese team, but truly, in a collaborative manner, working with an American team… it’s a mixture of all these ideas that come up with a very cool, wonderful idea,” he says. “Not every component of the game has to be made in Japan.”
Nostalgia for the great Japanese creations of an earlier era seems to be fueling many recent Kickstarter successes, Inafune notes. He made millions through crowd funding to produce Mighty No. 9, a sort of ersatz version of the 2-D, side-scrolling Mega Man games he used to make for Capcom. That’s finally about to come to fruition, as it’s slated to be published this September.
Even though he’s scored this sweet Microsoft deal for Recore, Inafune is still all about crowd funding as a method of making games big and small. “When you start making a [traditional] game, you always have this vision of the finished product, and that’s 100 percent,” Inafune says. “By the time you’re done, the percentage decreases, because you’re like, I think I have to cut this part, I don’t have the budget for this. The finished product will be less than 100 percent for sure. But in [Mighty No. 9]’s case, since it’s a Kickstarter project… if we make all the stretch goals, it means I could do everything I envisioned. That’s exactly what happened.”
“I think we proved that the North American market really wants games created by Japanese creators,” Inafune says of the successful campaigns that followed his. “If you want Japanese games in the States, maybe you should just ask the creators to start a Kickstarter.” Since Mighty No. 9‘s successful funding, former Castlevania producer Koji Igarashi and Shenmue director Yu Suzuki have successfully funded new games through the service to the tune of millions of dollars each.
And we might see Inafune return to crowd funding for another game, too. “Hopefully we can snowball this movement,” he says. “Igarashi-san’s Kickstarter was huge, and Suzuki-san’s will maybe pass that one. Maybe there’s someone else getting ready to do their own Kickstarter and surpass everyone else. Maybe it’s me.”
