Interviews

INTERVIEW: West-Maison of ADK and Konami

• by Heidi Kemps • In Arcades, Doujinshi, Interviews, Retro •   1

Working in the game industry often leads to some interesting career trajectories. Case in point: Our current interviewee.

I first saw West-Maison’s art on Twitter and was immediately impressed.. After following him for some time, I became very interested in his career and work. West-Maison’s time in gaming fandom and development took him down interesting paths: After working on a PC game at a small studio, he found himself helping in the creation of some of ADK’s finest games, then moving into development of portable, small-scale LCD games before helping to define the look of Konami’s early Bemani content and a popular toyline. Nowadays, he creates high-quality cosplay props for numerous clients.

Throughout everything, his love of art and gaming has remained strong. I approached him for an interview about his work, and he was eager to talk. Read on for a trip through a very interesting career!

Continue reading →

Interview: Takashi Tateishi, Composer at Capcom and Sound Producer at Konami

• by Heidi Kemps • In Game Music, Interviews •   0

I once again attended MAGfest this year, and had a wonderful time presenting panels alongside LordBBH. (Check out the videos of our panels!) My good friends from Brave Wave Productions were also in attendance, and this year they brought Takashi Tateishi as a guest. Tateishi-san has had quite an interesting career: working on one of the most beloved soundtracks ever in Megaman 2, lending his composition skills to cult favorites at Takeru, and doing a whole mess of sound work at Konami in the late 90s. I’m extremely happy to have had the chance to sit down and chat with him about his career. Read on for some interesting anecdotes about early game music development… and also learn about the rarest official Megaman music release of all time.

Continue reading →

INTERVIEW: Hideo Yoshizawa and Keiji Yamagishi

• by Heidi Kemps • In Interviews, Rad stuff, Retro •   4

Few games are as fondly remembered by NES kids as the Ninja Gaiden Trilogy. It’s not an exaggeration to say that these games put the small publisher Tecmo on the map and set a high bar for many action games going forward. Of course, part of the reson why these games were so good was the talented staff behind their production, which included director Hideo Yoshizawa and composer Keiji Yamagishi. But their exemplary work in games continues far beyond the adventures of Ryu Hayabusa: Yoshizawa has helped in the creation of fan favorites like Klonoa and Mr. Driller, while Yamagishi is involved with game music production company Brave Wave.

I was given the opportunity to interview both Yoshizawa and Yamagishi at MAGfest 2018, and was eager to get some insight on the creation of these games. I was joined in this interview by the wonderful Jonathan Wheeler, alias ProtonJon, who is one of the biggest classic Ninja Gaiden fans I know. (His questions are notated by italics.) Read on to learn plenty of surprising details about the origins of some of the most beloved games of all time (and a few notable obscurities)! (I also suggest watching the official panel they had at MAGfest, too!)

Continue reading →

INTERVIEW: Daichi Katagiri of Sega-AM2 (2011)

• by Heidi Kemps • In Arcades, Interviews •   3

When I first started gaming.moe, one of the things I wanted to do was republish a bunch of interviews that appeared in foreign-language magazines. That kind of fell by the wayside in favor of the endless fountain of writing ideas that seems to erupt from my brain — republishing old stuff I’d already written kind of felt lazy when there was so much else I wanted to create.

Of course, sometimes circumstances get in the way of actually accomplishing what you want, and that’s exactly what happened this month. So,once again, I find myself going back to the well of interviews to republish.This one, though — this is something I’ve been saving for a special occasion, like a fine wine waiting years to be uncorked. So I say, what better way to top off 2017, a remarkable year for games, than with a 2011 interview with Sega-AM2’s Daichi Katagiri, one of the people I respect most in the industry?

This interview was originally published in IG magazine, a French publication that also ran the IKD interview I posted here a while back. This interview is a little over six years old at this point, so it’s rather amusing to look at some of Katagiri-san’s comments and go “I think I see what he was hinting at there!” So grab some champagne, get your noisemakers ready, and ring in 2018 with one of Sega’s best and brightest.

Continue reading →

Interview: Akihiro Takanami/Hiroaki Fujimoto of h.a.n.d. and System Vision

• by Heidi Kemps • In Arcades, Interviews, Retro •   3

I don’t know why, but I’ve always been strangely fascinated by Ragnagard. It feels like such an anomaly in the Neo Geo’s massive library of fighting games on numerous levels: the CG visuals, the slow-feeling gameplay, the focus on aerial combos. It’s the sort of game that I’ve felt a compulsion to research, to figure out just how it came into being.

I’m the sort of person who will delve into weird internet rabbit holes over the course of researching stuff and pursuing information, and sometimes that yields incredibly interesting results. One day, when I was out looking for things related to Ragnagard on Japanese sites, I came across a page that had a gorgeous illustration of the game’s main female lead, Benten. But that’s not all that was there: alongside it were numerous anecdotes written by someone who was clearly heavily involved in the game’s development. It turned out this site was run by one Powerudon, an accomplished artist in the game industry who had been one of the driving forces behind Ragnagard’s development.

Looking around his site yielded more interesting tidbits of info, particularly related to a Super Famicom fighting game called The Battle Master. It hadn’t hit me that this and Ragnagard were done by the same developer, as they have a dramatically different feel, but Powerudon had laid out a lot of details about the mechanics and development of these titles on their site — alongside some incredible artwork

I knew I had to talk with Powerudon. One of the reasons I created gaming.moe is to preserve elements of gaming history that might otherwise be lost to time, particularly the words and memories of the people behind games both well-known and obscure. I reached out to Powerudon for an interview, and he agreed, so I emailed him a batch of questions.

A while later, he sent me a massive text file containing replies to all of the questions I had sent. I had asked him to go into as much detail as possible, and he did just that — for which I’m extremely grateful, because he has some really interesting anecdotes and thoughts on game development. So sit back, grab a drink, and enjoy a lengthy interview about System Vision, Battle Master, Ragnagard, and the tumultuous environment of game development in the early/mid-90s.

Special thanks to Tom James and Jason Moses for translation assistance!

Continue reading →

Interview: Taka Maekawa of Natsume-Atari

• by Heidi Kemps • In Interviews, Rad stuff, Retro •   0

It’s undeniable that there’s been renewed interest in certain retro genres as of late, but there’s one old-school arcade genre that rarely sees any modern-day love: the third-person crosshair shooter. The likes of Cabal, Blood Brothers, and NAM-1975 simply aren’t being made anymore in any format, and that’s extremely unfortunate.

So when Natsume announced that Wild Guns – a SNES game that served as both a loving tribute to the genre and one of its last great examples in the past few decades – was getting a revised an enhanced PS4 reissue as Wild Guns Reloaded… well, I knew that Gaming.moe would have to do something involving the game. This site is built on love for classic gaming genres and underappreciated gaming gems, after all! Even more exciting was the news that original development staff from Natsume-Atari was working on the game. Not only were they going to adapt the game for a new platform, but they planned to add all-new levels and characters as well! My hype was officially through the roof, and I doggedly pursued the chance to interview the game’s creators for a rare look into the creation of a true modern retro revival.

Thanks to the help of Mika and other great folks over at Natsume, we were able to arrange a discussion with Mr. Taka Maekawa, the game’s producer over at Natsume-Atari in Osaka. Please enjoy this exclusive interview about the creation of Wild Guns Reloaded — which, by the way, is now available on PSN and in a limited physical release!

Continue reading →

Interview: Hiroyuki Kimura of Tanoshimasu, Ltd.

• by Heidi Kemps • In Interviews, Mobile games •   0

日本語版はここです。

The landscape of Japanese gaming has changed tremendously over the past decade, and perhaps the most seismic shift is the explosive popularity of mobile gaming on smartphones. The accessibility, low cost, and ease of development for iOS and Android systems combined with the tremendous installed user base has created a brand new market for niche genres and retro-styled games. Shooting games in particular have encountered something of a resurgence on these platforms: Recently, CAVE’s Gothic wa Mahou Otome, a free-to-play shooter with touchscreen-based movement, has become the company’s biggest hit in years.

But Cave’s not the only face in the mobile STG scene. Recently, a new company called Tanoshimasu unveiled Aka to Blue, a mobile-based STG with a style akin to many of the late 90s-early 00s danmaku classics that established the bullet hell subgenre. It wasn’t terribly surprising to learn that the head of Tanoshimasu, Hiroyuki Kimura, was himself a former employee of CAVE.

Being a longtime CAVE fan, I’m pretty excited for this game, and I feel like it’s also the sort of game that would benefit greatly from more exposure and word-of-mouth. I reached out to Hiroyuki Kimura via a mutual contact and asked him if he’d like to talk a bit about his industry experience, the formation of Tanoshimasu, and the current state of Aka and Blue’s development. Read on!

Continue reading →

Interview: Suda51 of Grasshopper Manufacture

• by Heidi Kemps • In Interviews •   4

I’ve interviewed a lot of folks over the course of running this here website, but I feel like this man probably needs very little in the way of introduction. Goichi Suda (known as Suda51 – it’s Japanese goroawase, y’see) is an interesting, free-spirited, and somewhat enigmatic individual whose games are delightfully eclectic, mixing Eastern and Western humor, visual styles, and character tropes to create titles that are truly unlike anything else out there.

I had the opportunity to sit down with Suda51 at PAX West this year to talk a bit about The Silver Case, a remake of Grasshopper Manufacture’s very first game that will be launching on Steam next week. I wanted to dig a bit into his development background and how the game came to be — we’ve always had a bit more of a historically-minded slant on this site, and with this game being an important part of Suda51’s history, it only seemed fitting to focus heavily on that. We also go a bit into his wild No More Heroes design sessions and his modern development philosophy.

Continue reading →

Interview: Tetsuya Mizuguchi of Enhance Games

• by Heidi Kemps • In Interviews •   1

Tetsuya Mizuguchi was, at one point, known as a wunderkind for making great arcade racing games (and later Saturn ports of said racing games) before transitioning into a developer at the forefront of the intersection between music and games with titles like Space Channel 5, Lumines, and Rez. These days, he’s got a new company – Enhance Games – and is currently working on Rez Infinite, a re-imagining of perhaps his most beloved title for the PlayStation VR platform.

I had the opportunity to sit down with Mizuguchi at this year’s Game Developers Conference, not long after he gave his postmortem presentation on the production of Rez. Without further ado, let’s chat with Tetsuya Mizuguchi!

Continue reading →

Interview: Manami Matsumae, former Capcom and current freelance composer at BraveWave Music

• by Heidi Kemps • In Game Music, Interviews •   0

I went to MAGfest in the DC metro area again this year, after having a lot of fun last year and putting on a really cool panel. Besides doing another panel (which will be up shortly, with notes), I also had the opportunity to partake in some of the musical festivities – it is the Music and Gaming Festival, after all!

Above: Manami Matsumae plays the keyboard in a live performance of Mighty No. 9 songs at MAGfest 16.

Among the performers at the show was Manami Matsumae, a storied game composer currently working with BraveWave. She’s perhaps best known for her work on the original Rockman/Megaman. Her body of work encompasses many more great tunes, however, including several of Capcom’s early-90s arcade classics. She graciously took some time out of her busy schedule to chat with us during the event, and the result was some very cool anecdotes about working on the Capcom sound team during the great Japanese video game boom of the 80s and early 90s.

Read on for the details, and remember – it’s thanks to the support of readers like you that I’m able to travel and conduct cool interviews like these!

Continue reading →