You already know how a bill becomes a law, but here’s a fantastic behind-the-scenes on how a game idea becomes a real-live development project, from Capcom’s own Vice-President of Strategic Planning & Business Development, Christian Svensson!

Bringing Back the Wolf (or How Okami Wii Came to Be)

It’s not a mystery that Okami is a much loved game by its fans and the media. It’s won just about every award you can think of. It’s a testament to Clover’s unwavering vision and attention to detail.

That said, it’s also not a secret that the game in its first outing didn’t fare as well sales- wise as a game of its quality deserved. There are many reasons for this, and I’ll touch on at least one, a bit further below.

Your Opinion Matters (No, Really)

But before I do that, I want to talk about feedback Capcom has received from our consumers and how we’re trying to be responsive to it. Okami Wii specifically exists because of that direct communication, especially those we receive on our message boards (even if they’re sometimes mean to us).

Even before the Okami’s PS2 release, the media and Capcom fans would constantly ask us if it was ever going to come to Wii, citing the interface as being ideal for the brush mechanics. Hell, even in the week prior to the Wii announcement, there were questions in our Ask Capcom section, requesting the game (and some hot fan-created Wii packaging too… I’ve already challenged our marketing group to make sure ours is better).

The Lifecycle Factor

After seeing the repeated requests, we started thinking seriously about some of the factors that had gone into Okami’s prior performance (at least in the West, I can’t speak for Japan). One of the major ones (and certainly not the only one), as we saw it, was where Okami arrived in the PS2 lifecycle. Having done the analysis in the past of in which years new IP performs best (and worst), it’s not surprising that it’s not later in the hardware lifecycle, where the active consumers tend to be more price and brand sensitive. But here we were shipping a beautiful, but new and creative title on the PS2 in a year where the 360 had already been on the market for many months and the PS3 and Wii were about to launch. It’s unfortunate that beauty and creativity aren’t always rewarded by the market, but that’s the reality.

The bulk of our core audience was thinking about new platforms. And while there are standout new IP successes like God of War that released that same year (albeit 9 months earlier than Okami), it’s was still an uphill battle no matter how you sliced it.

The Second Shot

So at the same time, we started thinking of several “what if?” statements. What if we took a second shot with Okami’s content on another console? A platform people were repeatedly asking for it on? A platform that could help with some of the core mechanics of the game? And now that it was already semi-known and loved for sure by the media, it’s no longer technically a new IP. It really deserved a second chance. Thankfully, others in our organization felt the same way.

Our team at CEI started putting out feelers to the powers-that-be in Japan to see if this would be something that that wouldn’t trod too heavily on anyone politically. True to form recently, our executives in Japan were supportive of the concept. To set the framework, this was back in January 07 where we first started seriously exploring this project. Wii had shipped about six weeks earlier and I think it’s fair to say, it was exceeding our expectations at the time (though that really wasn’t a major factor in the decision).

We started to see what assets were archived in Japan and what shape they were in. Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, if this was going to happen, we had to find someone who could fill Clover’s much-beloved shoes. This was no small task.

So Who’s Going to Develop This Thing?

We needed a talented developer with a track record for quality for the sake of the title, the sake of the fans and for the sake of our board of director’s approval. This was never going to be a quick turn and burn cash in and some of you may have read my response to those who alleged it was (scroll down a little to see my post). The project was far too important to do anything other than applying the utmost TLC if we were going to be successful.

Now I’m not our front line dev relations guy, but I do have a fair set of contacts in the development world from my prior career, and I do a lot of business development, so from time to time, I get involved in these searches and almost always in the contract negotiations.

All the same, arriving at Ready at Dawn was really a serendipitous coincidence rather than a brilliantly planned strategy.

It went down like this.

The Power of Beer

I was drinking late night at Jamil Moledina’s suite at GDC (I’ll pick that name back up in a minute), when a friend of mine introduced me to Ready at Dawn’s Co-Founder and Creative Director, Ru Weerasuriya. After he learned I worked at Capcom he began to gush, unbidden, about his love of Okami’s artistry. Obviously, given that this was the work of Clover and Capcom Japan, I certainly couldn’t say much other than to agree with his assessment of the game’s charm. The credit was certainly theirs. This was mid-March 07.

That same evening, RAD had picked up an IDGA award for their work on Daxter, a game that I had respected greatly for its execution. And I was well aware of the team’s heritage and contributions to their prior employers at Naughty Dog and Blizzard (Ru hailed from the latter and you’d probably recognize a lot of his work on some of their biggest games).

We talked for quite a while over more beers and by the end of the conversation, I really liked the cut of Ru’s jib. The things that RAD was really interested in, dovetailed well with where I saw CEI placing its priorities with our fledgling product development operation. I thought that if the rest of the RAD team shared his passion, maybe there was something here? I didn’t mention anything about Okami Wii that night but slyly suggested we touch base the week after GDC regarding a potential opportunity. Ru was intrigued and we agreed to set something up. Truthfully, I wasn’t at all sure they would want to be handling a port given their success with Daxter and their current high-profile project, God of War: Chains of Olympus. I had also heard they wanted to pursue their own IP on future projects. But these things are always worth a chat to explore.

The Pitch

When we had that conversation the following week, I met Didier Malenfant, co-Founder and President at RAD. After some small talk and probing to see if his views of the world were like Ru’s (they were), there really wasn’t any graceful way to broach the matter with Ru and Didier, so I just blurted out “How would you guys like to bring Okami to the Wii?” I don’t quite recall the next thing they said. I think there were a few moments of silence on the other end of the phone as the question sank in.

We ended the conversation with them taking some time to evaluate whether they were interested in taking on the project and if so, what resources they would have available to do the job. I was cautiously optimistic about the prospects of a deal.

The a couple days later, we sorted out mutually agreeable basic terms and we started moving Capcom’s internal green light process forward. Didier himself was going to lead the project (his background is in programming) which gave me a great deal of comfort.

On to Green Light

Our green light process is a bit lengthy. We have multiple levels of approvals internally, numbers have to be generated, project specifications created and in this case, we wanted to have the RAD guys come up and have a look at the assets to see if it was even technically possible. That happened a few weeks later, in April 07.

Again, this is someone else’s code and neither CEI nor RAD was going to be getting any assistance from the busy folks in Japan on the project. It’s not a slam dunk by any means.

The first thing we found that day: the assets were commented in Japanese (duh!) and incomplete (doh!), but the guys were able to figure out the basic structure of things and thought they’d be able to pull it off eventually (even if they had to reconstruct some assets). We managed to put some feelers into Japan and a few weeks later, they found another hard drive with some Okami assets which were sent to us. This was the bulk of what was missing in the prior drop.

I think it was somewhere in May when we received permission to move forward with the full project by our board of directors. Some weeks after that, the team had established technical feasibility and both RAD and Capcom were up for moving to the next level.

Current Status

As it stands today, the team has the game assets converted (quite the laborious process), up and running in a ported version of Clover’s engine. There are still several systems getting set up properly but there’s most definitely a Wii-driven Amaterasu running around Wii-rendered environments as we speak. We’ve got the home videos to prove it (and no, you can’t see them yet, sorry).

As we’ve stated before, Okami is such a huge game (40+ hours to complete isn’t at all uncommon), we aren’t currently planning any additional content but we’re exploring a few possible things on the technical side of things that might make for an improved Wii experience (no promises yet though). Obviously, the biggest change to the game will be the introduction of the Wii motion controls, the details of which we’ll also share at a later date.

In the mean time, the game is on schedule for release in Spring of 2008 and I’m sure you’ll be hearing more from Capcom and Ready at Dawn as we bring new updates closer to release.

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 15th, 2007 at 3:21 pm and is filed under Wii, Feature, Okami. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.