Keiichi Yano explains how Project Rap Rabbit came to be

A portion of a USGamer interview with dev Keiichi Yano...

USgamer: I'm curious to hear the genesis of Project Rap Rabbit. How did you and Masaya Matsuura get together?

Keiichi Yano: Yeah, so, it happened last year, actually. The publisher P-Cube — they're based in the UK, an independent publisher — they and myself, we got together and began discussing the possibility of maybe creating a new rhythm action game. We started going down that path, and we had the idea that... well, they're a small publisher, and they don't have a ton of money. So we turned to Kickstarter to see if our fans would support something like this.

I've had lots of dialogue with Matsuura-san about what the next version of a rhythm action game could be. We've compared and exchanged lots of ideas over the years, and I thought, "It would be really great if I could work with him and we could do something new to reboot the genre." So I called him up, and said, "Let's try."

At first, it was all sort of noncommittal. We just threw some ideas at the wall to see what we could come up with. But after about maybe a month of talking, we found that there were a lot of similarities in what we were thinking about the state of the world: The environment, the political climate, all those kind of things. We thought that we could tell a really good story and have a really good message in a story-based music game.

After about a month of that, we decided, "Yeah, let's do this." And then we started thinking about what these stories could be. The concept for the world would come... that's where we came to the idea of the history of Japan. We had this phrase in mind: "History repeats itself." If you think about the protectionist state of the world right now, we really felt it important as artists to have a message of acceptance and inclusiveness. But obviously not to be so political.