Inafune Knew Dead Rising Was A Home Run

We recently had a chance to talk with Capcom's Keiji Inafune during our trip to Blue Castle Games in Vancouver. As the company's global head of production, he's been in charge of making sure that its games are up to snuff. He's been critical of Japanese development and has worked closely with Western developers over the past few years. In our conversation we talked about how that strategy has been working out for Capcom, how he knew his Dead Rising was going to be successful, and much more.

What’s going on with the Dead Rising movie?

Dead Rising 2 is being made by Blue Castle, and I have hands on of course, but in the three years of development there are times where I wasn’t able to much supervising. So I thought, ‘What can I do with this time?’ It’s not like I have a lot of extra time, but what could I do for the fans? Dead Rising is a game that’s targeted toward zombie fans, so as a zombie movie fan, maybe I could make a movie for those fans that’s sort of related to the world of Dead Rising.

Do you see yourself making more of these movies in the future?

I’d like to make more movies, as much as I’d like to make games. After making this film, it took a lot of my time. As much as I’d like to make movies, there are people at executive levels who maybe want me to use my time on other things. I want to make movies and games, and maybe in the future something that would integrate the two—the essence of the two mediums.

How involved have you been in the production of Dead Rising 2?

In terms of the game, I’m involved from the beginning in the story, creating the story and the basic game design. We have some staff, like six staff in Osaka R&D, so everyone is very involved in the basic concept and game design. Typically what happens with a developer in the publisher developer relationship is the you say to the developer, ‘Here’s Dead Rising, please make Dead Rising,’ and that’s it, there’s not a whole lot of involvement. With this game, both parties are heavily involved. We have weekly video conferences that last anywhere from two hours to four hours, and we do that once a week. We also have regular visits, where we come maybe every other month, and they’ll come just as often. It’s a very collaborative development.

Dead Rising was interesting because it was a Japanese look at American culture. With the sequel, we’re getting a look at American culture through a Japanese and Canadian prism. Has Blue Castle given you any insight in how Americans are presented in the sequel?

Blue Castle had a lot of input into making this game into where it is now. It’s interesting because since Canadians tried to take on what we did successfully on what we did in Dead Rising, they had a lot of input that blended together into an integration. It made it a lot better. The interesting part about Dead Rising 2 is that the setting is the United States. It’s really hard for Americans to find humor in and make fun of their own culture, but with Japanese and Canadian eyes we could overexaggerate what Western culture is. I think that’s what’s adding to the black humor in the game.

Did you leave the ending of Dead Rising purposefully vague for a sequel, or does Dead Rising 2 tie into the first game directly?

Making a sequel is so dependent on the success of the first game, so I didn’t know if there was going to be a sequel. Right until the very end of development of Dead Rising there were a lot of people who were negative about it—internally. It was almost a hit or a miss. When I made the game, I knew it was going to be a home run, so I was confident that there was going to be a sequel, so I laid it out so I could make the smooth transition to a sequel.

Were you surprised at the reaction that the first game’s save system generated? It seems like it has outspoken fans and detractors.

I was surprised in the fact that people liked the save system and thought it worked. The first save system that we had wasn’t the perfect system. It could have been more friendly, but we had a lot of limitations in time to make the game, and there were only so many things that we could do.

Do you think the save system was criticized because players are just getting weak?

I don’t think players are getting weak in any way. I think they’re able to voice their opinions more than before. Back then, when there was no save system in the carts, as a gamer you’re just so happy with the fact that a game came out, just the simple fact that a game came out. ‘Thank you for getting this great game out. Maybe there are flaws, but I don’t care. It’s a great game as a whole.’ Nowadays, it’s kind of changed. Playing a great game is almost a given. You expect the game to be great. If it doesn’t meet the needs in some ways, then people tend to voice that more than before. I think they’ve just changed a little bit.

You’ve been an outspoken critic of Japanese game development. How do you think the Japanese have lost their way?

From a creator’s standpoint, back in the SNES era, maybe about 90 percent of the games were Japanese made—or at least the better ones. Going on to the next generation, maybe it was about 70 percent. It goes on, and with the PS2 it was almost half. Right now, it’s almost to a point where it’s the other way around; almost 90 percent of the fun games are western games. If you look at the history it’s interesting, because westerners have played Japanese games all their lives and they’ve learned from that and put their touch on it, and that’s why you have all these great games. Japanese creators have always played Japanese games. The only textbook they have to base their games on are Japanese games. That’s why what you’re seeing now is the west has taken the good parts of Japanese games and made them better, whereas the Japanese creators only look at what they’ve made. I think that’s the biggest difference that we see now.

After games like Bionic Commando and Dark Void were released with somewhat disappointing results, what has Capcom learned about working with Western developers? Do you still plan on using the strategy of working with existing IP, creating new games, and rebooting old series?

It’s the balance between having new IPs and also having sequels and also resurrecting older IPs. Working with the west, Dark Void wasn’t the success that we’d hoped for, but we’ve learned a lot from working with them [Airtight Games]. The way we worked with Grin on Bionic Commando and the way we worked with Airtight on Dark Void is completely different from the way we work with Blue Castle Games. We’ve taken the lessons that we’ve learned from them and implemented them with Blue Castle. Right now it seems to be working great. Creating new IPs with Western developers right now is a little bit difficult, because this game hasn’t been a success yet because it hasn’t been released, but once it’s released I’m confident that Western developers can make new IPs for us. It can only happen if we have that trust with the developer. It’s not the typical publisher developer relationship, which we’re sort of the boss. Right now with Blue Castle we can be honest with one another and really have meaningful discussions about the game so nobody is better than one another. We’re working together to make a great game. We have that team feel.