When Shinji Enomoto, operating officer at Konami and head of its consumer software section, talks about turning points for his company, one stands out pretty well above the others. “We had a mission to make a title that could appeal globally, and I remember gathering up all the best talent within our company to tackle that,” he told Famitsu magazine in an interview published this week. “The resulting Metal Gear Solid series has grown into one with massive fan support; it established the Hideo Kojima brand. It gave us the confidence that Konami could fend for itself on the global market.”
It’s that ability to fend for itself globally that Konami and Enomoto want to expand upon in the coming years, which has forced them to re-evaluate the Japanese game-development method extensively. “A lot of game makers in Japan enter the business developing consumer games with tools they receive from the hardware manufacturers,” Enomoto said. “Most creators in the US and Europe, meanwhile, start with PC games and move on to consoles with tools they’ve developed themselves. So in Japan, if a designer wants to check the motion he’s just built, he needs to get a programmer to work on it, whereas with Western systems the designer can do all the checking himself and proceed along that way. If we had the same amount of time and personnel to create a game with, a Japanese team would need three-fourths of that time to make the graphics, where it’d be about half for an overseas team. That’s a major difference in the amount of brush-up time you have, and Japanese companies are starting to pay attention to that as they streamline their development process.”
NeverDead (above), the Rebellion-developed action project Konami first showed off at E3 last year, is part of that streamlining effort. “The theme here is to see what would happen if you combined their more efficient technical knowledge with Japan’s game-design powers,” Enomoto explained. “We can really feel that happening as we work alongside them, and the result is that we can realize Japan’s game-design skills at a much higher technical level. Bringing that know-how back to Japan at the end of it will help us change how game creation works at Konami.”
