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First, Happy New Year 2008, everyone! ZOE:TUS has been dormant for over a year with just about zero updates on the site's progress -- because we understand that, here's to a new year with the opening of several areas of the site, and, for the first time, a translation of an interview from the Japanese ZOE2 premium package with ZOE and ZOE2 producer Hideo Kojima! Hideo Kojima is the producer of both Zone of the Enders and ANUBIS: Zone of the Enders. The ANUBIS: Zone of the Enders Premium Package, released in Japan, includes a visual book featuring an interview with Kojima. In the interview, Kojima shares thoughts regarding his experience as producer for both titles. You’ve served as producer for both ZOE titles now – what exactly does that involve? "Traditionally, being a producer means evaluating the profitability of a project, planning its promotional campaign and release date, selecting its main staff members, and so on, and I think as a rule they shouldn’t interfere with its actual production. If I created the game’s system or its maps, it would end up becoming my game. That’s the one thing I want to avoid. For instance, the ingredients, if you like, that we’re using with the Anubis team are almost entirely the same as with the Metal team. The ingredients might be the same, but I’m not the chef – Shuyo Murata, whom I call Murashu, he’s the chef. So even if he took the same tuna to make nigiri [a type of sushi], you wouldn’t expect it to taste the same. That’s what I want to emphasize in my role. I want to make sure we maintain the space that exists between the producer and the director as much as possible. That ultimately didn’t happen with the first game. You could say I was worried about the same thing happening this time around, and in the end it did feel like it happened again (laughs). Not as much as the first game, though. "Of course I do look over the game plan and such, and I did ask them to change the original plot several times, but in the end they’re the ones who actually make the game. I do stop by the production area every day, but I never tell them how something should be. I do make it clear if I personally don’t particularly like something, though. "I was a little shocked when I played the first build, as our design philosophies aren’t the same. Just little things here and there. I guess in a way it’s my game and it’s not my game. The ingredients and utensils are all the same, but because it’s not my recipe, it isn’t going to taste the same. But I think that’s a good thing." Can you tell us about how you met Director Shuyo Murata? "It’s a bit of a long story that actually goes back to when I joined Konami’s Kobe offices in 1986. The company had no planners before I joined, with me being the first. At the time, its main focus was arcade games, so everyone would plan a game together and a designer or a programmer would serve as team leader. You don’t need to focus so much on the story and whatnot in a shooting game, so it’d be like “Should we make a snow stage?” or “Let’s make an ocean stage.” “What kind of boss would the ocean stage have, an octopus?” “What about a squid, what kind of attack would it have?” “It’d shoot ink, wouldn’t it?” That’s the way things went back then (laughs). Since I was a planner, everyone else picked me on a lot. No one cared at all about how developed a game’s world was. But then when RPGs really took off in 1995, our head office began to think they needed a dedicated planning department, so they established one and hired about 6 or 7 new people to fill it. Because all they did was planning, though, they couldn’t draw, or program, or write music. I can draw, in my case, but I was very close to that (laughs). Then the company started this tele-learning program, which they asked me to participate in, and one time I went to Tokyo for it to meet them all for the first time. Murashu was one of those people. [Keisuke] Yoshitomo, who’s now a line producer, and [Shinta] Nojiri, who now works for me as a planner, were also among that group. They’d gathered together a very talented bunch of people." ————————————————— |