Dear Reader:
The man behind Okami, Viewtiful Joe wants to work on Wii, DS
A portion of a 1up interview with Atsushi Inaba of Platinum Games…
1UP: Before, I guess when you guys had the support of Capcom, even before you formed Clover Studio, you could get away with doing games like Steel Battalion with its giant, unique controller and stuff like that, but now that you’re moving on, is there any sort of preference, like, for the console you develop for? You know, is the Wii a more attractive proposition because maybe it’s not as complex and doesn’t require as much manpower to create a title for that system as the PS3 might, or are handhelds a more attractive console because maybe they don’t take as many resources?
AI: Of course the Wii and DS are attractive platforms; they’re platforms that aren’t competing by way of the graphics. It’s more about the gameplay. Of course we do want to create games on Wii and DS. But we have staff that has been creating games on the newest technology, like the PS3 and Xbox 360, so we are not interested in cutting that out. Because, if we do that, that’s going to cut out one of the flavors available to us. So even if it’s going to be tough creating a game on one of those platforms, we are not going to give up on that. We are going to create games on these platforms, too.
To be honest, if we’re going to consider the Western market, we should be thinking of creating a game on the 360; however, the 360 is not doing that good in Japan, and we’re a Japanese studio, so do we want to ignore Japan? And let’s think about the European market. Well, is 360 doing good there? No. So OK, what about PS3? Well, how well the PS3 is doing is still kind of vague, you don’t know where to go with PS3. Now let’s look at Wii. Wii has a huge market, but are there real game titles that are popular on Wii? And the answer is no, there are no real titles out there yet. So right now the consumer machines are in a very not-clear stage. So, to be honest, I wish that there was just one platform, one winning platform that we could concentrate on.