Monolith Soft co-founder on moving away from Namco, being nervous about joining Nintendo

A portion of a Monolith Soft internal interview with co-founder Hirohide Sugiura...

Q: That was certainly a major moment of divergence for Monolith Soft. Did you have any feelings of uncertainty?

Sugiura: “It would be a lie to say that I wasn’t feeling any uncertainties. There was the worry about only being able to make games on Nintendo’s platforms after becoming a Nintendo subsidiary. That meant we wouldn’t be able to make PC games. Jumping into an environment with such a restriction was certainly one of the challenges. However, after taking those feelings of uncertainty to Nintendo, they were very understanding, and challenged us with ‘let’s make something for this one hardware with only this much time and this many people.’ I think only Nintendo would come up with something like that in today’s industry. I believe that our mindset of ‘let’s keep thoroughly creating and see how far we can get’ was made possible because Nintendo had our back.”

Q: Do you feel any kind of “change” since becoming a Nintendo subsidiary?

Sugiura: “That would be a ‘change in consciousness.’ If the content isn’t good enough then Nintendo won’t green-light the commercialization, and that’s a hurdle we naturally raised on our own. Everyone had the level of consciousness that asked ‘is the quality good enough like that?’ and I believe it was quite a change from the time Monolith Soft first started. And this change in the level of consciousness was made possible thanks to the environment provided from being a subsidiary of Nintendo. Looking at it in an administrative point of view, the most important thing is finding the right balance.”