Castlevania: Lords Of Shadow – The Epic Konami Interview – Part 1 of 2

Konami Europe seems to be more creatively prolific than in the past. How did that happen?
Yeah, it’s been a long process. I run the Konami development studio in Europe and there’s only actually five of us there, so it’s been a bit of an uphill struggle. We did a couple of smaller games. We did New International Track & Field, which was very well received, and we did GTI Club, which was pretty good too. I think, at that point, they began to trust us a little bit more, and they’ve put more trust in us as we’ve shown more of what we can do.

Yeah, I think Konami is looking to its western side of the business to contribute more. And it’s been pretty tough in the last five or six years, waving our little flag and saying ‘look, help us, we can do this too.’ And I think having Kojima-san’s backing on this project has certainly helped us get a bit more profile within the company.

There’s a lot of talk that the west either understands the modern gaming audience better than Japan or simply has a better technical ability. Is that something you agree with?
I don’t agree actually. My experience is that Japan does things different and perhaps they can learn some things from the west, such as how to make development more efficient, if you like. And I think that’s one of the reasons why Kojima-san has got so involved, so that he can see how a western developer approaches game development. But, on the other hand, there are some amazing games coming out of Japan and I think we in the west could learn a hell of a lot from Japan. So I think it’s wrong to say that Japan’s behind because there are clearly some amazing titles coming out of Japan. But I think we can all work from eachother. What Japan tends to do is develop one particular stage to prove the concept, they polish and polish, spend a lot of time on it and then end up with this really cool single stage and think, well we better finish the rest of the game now. So they end up putting a lot of muscle behind it to get the rest of the game done. Whereas in the west, it’s my experience that we plan better, and we tend to have our projects cone together at the end. Every month there’s a new master, whereas in Japan they don’t have that mentality.

With that in mind, what have been the challenges involved in collaborating with Japan?
What we found was that at the beginning of the project, when we were showing people what we were doing, there wasn’t much to show. Because there was a lot of planning involved and though we had levels up and running very quickly they were also very basic. The visuals weren’t fantastic and you’d show it to them and they’d say ‘That doesn’t look very good’. To which we’d say, ‘Yeah, we haven’t done the art side of it yet. We just want to prove that it works.’ And I think, for them, they found that hard to believe. And that’s what I’m saying about this prototype meeting. It wasn’t until we showed that prototype, which was a vertical slice of the game, about 70% of what the final game would look like, that’s when people said ‘Wow, this is amazing. This looks fantastic.’ So I think, in that respect, there’s a slight difference. In Japan, I’ve looked at some of the Kojima Productions stuff early on and it looks amazing, but it’s only one level. It’s a different way of thinking.

Part two of our in-depth interview is now online and can be read here.

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