Rocketmen: Interviews From Uranus

Now that Rocketmen: It Came From Uranus is released for on both XBLA and PSN, I finally got the guys behind the madness to sit down and answer some hard hitting questions. In addition to probing them about Uranus, I also got them to give me way too much information about them you never wanted to know.

Let’s start with the typical softball question: What are your names and what do you do at Acronym?

Funky Swadling: My name is Daniel “Funky” Swadling, and I’m a producer, programmer and designer for Rocketmen, as well as one of A.C.R.O.N.Y.M.’s founders. Since we’re not a huge company, we all get to wear a bunch of different hats when working on a project.

Jesse Joudrey: I’m Jesse Joudrey, the other founder of A.C.R.O.N.Y.M. as well as technical officer for the company, and was a programmer and designer for Rocketmen.

Jeff Yu: Hey, I’m Jeff Yu, producer on Rocketmen.

How was Acronym started? Any particular reason?

JJ: A.C.R.O.N.Y.M. was started primarily because we believed that a small team of creative people could create small, fun games and have a much better time doing it compared with working on a 100+ person team.

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Posted in Capcom Digital, Interviews, Rocketmen: Axis of Evil, Rocketmen™ | 1 Comment »

My favorite WWE Superstar’s Wish? To be a Street Fighter!

Being a professional wrestling fan I was very excited to read in this months Nintendo Power that one of my favorite wrestlers Matt Hardy wishes to be Vega from Street Fighter II.

Apparently Nintendo Power asked several WWE Superstars what character from a video game they would like to be and Matt Hardy said this, “I would be the dude with the claw from Street Fighter II, Vega. I was a big fan of Vega back in the day, just because he was so cool and he did flips and stuff like that.” Having watched many of his matches this makes a lot of sense.

Posted in Interviews, Street Fighter® | 1 Comment »

Gamasutra Talks With David Sirlin

Gamasutra has posted an interview with David Sirlin, whom you know as, if you’ve been following our blog (If you haven’t, you should!), the man behind the remixing of Super Street Fighter II Turbo HD Remix. The interview probes Sirlin and the changes and why they were made, and why he thinks it will ultimately help bring in a new generation of Street Fighters without ruining it for the hardcore fans.

David Sirlin: There’s been a lot of reporting that the game was dumbed down or something, but I think people are off base there. The changes that make the moves easier to do, do not really affect high-level tournament play at all. There’s a couple of cases where the move changes really do affect it, and I’ve changed the properties of the moves to compensate, but in most of the cases, it doesn’t really affect the balance.

Posted in Gamasutra, Interviews, Super Street Fighter II Turbo HD Remix | 1 Comment »

Wii Fanboy Interviews Didier Malenfant, Cofounder of Ready At Dawn

Recently, right on our very own forums, fans repeatedly expressed some displeasure at the caliber of third party games coming out on the Nintendo Wii. One of the many points often heard is that the Wii is often on the receiving end of many ports, particular PS2 ports. However, one exception to this complaint has been the upcoming Okami for the Wii. As Wii Fanboy puts it, Okami is “the perfect example of how porting games can be a force for good”.

To that end, they interviewed Didier Malenfant, president and co-founder of Ready At Dawn, the folks responsible for the awesome port of Okami. They asked him to dish on such things as his side of the “how Okami came to be” story, why you should play the Wii version of Okami even if you have played the PS2 version previously, and how they dealt with the pressure of porting an award winning and critically acclaimed game.

What helped the most was the fact that we were all huge fans of the game ourselves to begin with. You don’t take a game as beautiful as Okami and think that you can mess with it, try to add content that doesn’t belong there or something. We have so much respect for the original game that we decided from the get-go that this was going to be a labor of love. The goal was to reproduce the experience as closely as possible. If it’s not broken, don’t fix it basically.

Check Wii Fanboy to read the entire interview.

Posted in Interviews, Okami | 1 Comment »

Resident Evil 5 Famitsu Interview With Takeuchi-san

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Japan’s Famitsu magazine recently conducted a video interview with Jun Takeuchi, the producer of Resident Evil 5, and we now have the video complete with English subs for your viewing pleasure! In addition to the interview, the video include a brief introduction into the history of the Resident Evil series, many first-ever shots of actual gameplay, and also includes some behind the scenes development sneak peeks.

Update: You can now download a high-res MP4 version of the interview by right-clicking here.

Posted in Famitsu, Interviews, Resident Evil® | No Comments »

Predicting Game Sales Is Like Playing GnG On Hard (now feat. a TON of update material from Sven!)

**This article is currently an update to yesterday’s update of Christian Svensson’s original interview with Patrick Klepek at the MTV Multiplayer Blog. There is a ton of new material so if you saw it before, check it out again. It is important to note that:

1) this is now officially out of control (in the best way possible)

2) I am jealous of Klepek’s industry-leading haircut.

–

Patrick Klepek recently got to sit down with our own Christian Svensson (The guy who cures all your burning itches by answering questions in our Ask Capcom forum) for an interesting interview for the MTV Multiplayer blog. This wasn’t your typical interview of the, “How did you make Final Fight: Streetwise so awesome?” variety. Instead, the article focuses on the sales side of the gaming industry and all the behind the scenes action that you generally never hear about.

“The sales life cycle of a product is shrinking,” said Svensson. If a game undersells its first month at retail, it’s finished at retail. Often, though, it’s quicker: if a game underperforms its first week, it is more than likely “dead on arrival.”

Predicting how well a game will sell is an extremely difficult, yet extremely important aspect of the business.

Capcom keeps a warehouse of additional units in case a game has a surprisingly strong launch or sudden surge in sales. They have extra “Devil May Cry 4″ inventory just sitting around in case a retailer calls up and says they need another 30-40,000 units.

If they don’t have those units immediately available, the retailer may just cancel the order entirely and move onto the next big game. “Demand may not be there [anymore] if a request goes a week ignored,” said Svensson.

The beauty of working here is that I can go directly to the source, and as I was typing this up, Christian just happened to wander by my cube. Usually I would beat him off with unopened copies of Streetwise, but this time I let him stick around because he offered to fill in a bit more information here on the Capcom blog.

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Posted in MTV Multiplayer Blog, Sven, Interviews | 2 Comments »

Crispy Gamer Puts Hiroyuki Kobayashi On The Hot Seat

 Crispy Gamer has an interview up with our Hiroyuki Kobayashi, producer of the recently released Devil May Cry 4. In it, Kobayashi discusses the cultural references in DMC4, deftly deflects shots at Devil May Cry 2 (Let’s just pretend it never existed), what inspirations went into DMC4, and the possibility of DMC4 on the Wii:

“You know, a lot of people ask us if we are going to bring out a Wii version. I simply don’t think you can make the game the type of game it is, with the awesome graphics and control — I don’t think that would work on the Wii. So, I don’t think we’re going to bring one out, no.”

Check out the whole interview on Crispy Gamer.

Posted in Hiroyuki Kobayashi, Crispy Gamer, Interviews, Devil May Cry® | No Comments »

Daryl Allison, Sr. Producer, Talks Okami Wii

Today we bring you the first in a series of interviews with Daryl Allison, Sr. Producer here at Capcom, who will be giving us a sneak peek into the upcoming Okami for the Nintendo Wii. Best of all, he will be fielding user questions! If you have burning Okami Wii question, ask us in the comments. If Daryl answers your question, you may win a special prize!

First of all, can you tell our readers who you are and what you do here at Capcom? What is your role on the Okami Wii team?

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Posted in Wii, Interviews, Okami | 7 Comments »

Interview with Sam Reich, director of “Street Fighter: The Later Years”

StreetFighterDevotion.com is at it again. This time they’re interviewing Sam Reich, director of original content at CollegeHumor.com and all-around nice guy. Sam talks about where the idea for the series came from, the actors, and upcoming developments.

SAM: We shoot on location in New York City. A lot of Street Fighter happens to be in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Zangief gets fired from Barcade, which is a popular retro arcade/bar in Williamsburg. Most of the apartments (Bison’s, Chun Li’s, etc.) are in Queens. We did a lot in Central Park in episode five. And the Capcom offices are our very own CollegeHumor offices. Capcom invited us to shoot in their offices, but in the end we thought ours were better.

Click here to read the whole thing.

Posted in Webisodes, Interviews, Street Fighter® | No Comments »

Kotaku Feature On Ben Judd, Bionic Commando Producer

Kotaku editor Brian Ashcraft does his thing from across the big pond over in Japan. In fact, he does it from the city of Osaka, which just happens to be where Castle Capcom is located. This makes Ben Judd, who is in Japan, producing games, a mere stone’s throw away and naturally a great interview candidate, and so Kotaku did exactly that.

Brian has just posted on Kotaku said exclusive interview where Ben discloses more about how he got started in the industry and ended up at the console game development mecca known as Japan, how Bionic Commando went from a possible 2D portable title to a next-gen AAA experience, working with both Japanese and Swedish developers at the same time, and having hot dogs hanging off your arm…

After graduation, he got a job at an import video game shop and kept studying Japanese full speed. He measured his progress by his ability to understand Final Fantasy games in their native lingo. “When I got Final Fantasy VII and Cloud showed up in a bath with other men,” Judd remember, “I had no clue what was going on.” By the time he got to FFIX, he could completely understand 98 percent of the game in Japanese. But Judd knew that if he was ever going to use his language skills, he need to get it damn close to perfect - as perfect as it was going to be for a non-native speaker. Making the trip out to Japan again, he got a job teaching English. His free time was spent honing his language skills. “Then about that time, there was a death in the family,” Judd says. “Here I was whiling away my time in Japan. I needed to get back to States.” Capcom USA had a job opening, and Judd applied. Translation tests, interview-after-interview and teleconferences in Tokyo followed. Judd was hired. And after a stint working in the American office, he was back in Japan.

Check out the whole feature on Kotaku.

Posted in Bionic Commando, PS3, Xbox 360, Interviews | No Comments »