Everyone seems to have a Ken Kutaragi story. That was the only real premise I had for this article. I’d heard a few Kutaragi anecdotes while working on my Final Fantasy 7 thing, and it seemed like there were many more out there. So I started asking around and figured I could stitch a bunch of stories together,…
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Last year, I published a Final Fantasy 7 oral history on Polygon. It was a big thing! The longest story I’d ever done. Too long for the internet, really. So we ended up teaming up with Read-Only Memory to turn it into a book. A Kickstarter campaign, a hundred or so emails and some sweet…
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After writing about concept teams earlier this year, I heard about GenDesign’s plan to work with a new investment fund and decided to follow the team’s next steps. I didn’t end up getting quite as much meat out of it as I’d hoped, but we ended up with one of the best illustrations we’ve run on…
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This is one of those ideas that’s hard to sell in a headline, but I think is fascinating. It’s a big look at developers who form small concept teams to generate designs and oversee projects, and then team up with other studios to see those through, rather than doing the heavy lifting internally. It’s basically an…
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Konami’s PR campaign for Metal Gear Survive focused on the game rather than the people who made it. That silence made me curious, so after the game shipped I dug through its credits to try to find out more about the team. The story ended up with more caveats and speculation than I typically like to include,…
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A couple months ago, I heard from Microsoft that Cuphead developers Chad and Jared Moldenhauer were coming to San Francisco. They were scheduling press interviews and wondered if I wanted to do one. Initially, I wasn’t terribly excited about it. I loved the game but didn’t have much of an angle to pursue. So I figured I’d…
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After following-up with the main character from the Final Fantasy story, it seemed only right that I do the same with Street Fighter. So just before the 2017 Tokyo Game Show, I met with Akira Nishitani to learn more about his return to fighting games. Art: Michael Firman
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I thought it would be nice to follow-up on the Final Fantasy 7 story with a look at what its main character is doing now. Art: Michael Firman
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Why retail is in trouble. Photo: Jonathan Castillo
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I have mixed feelings on this one. I had to do the story on a tight deadline, which in some cases meant relying on email interviews, which in some cases resulted in quotes that read like they came from email interviews. And since I wanted to stick to the talking heads format, I ended up…
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ly7Rd4OOB8I Photo: Jonathan Castillo
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https://www.polygon.com/2017/1/9/14196762/final-fantasy-7-tactics-marketing-plans-square-sony Photo: Jonathan Castillo
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In early 2014, I posted a story called Street Fighter 2: An oral history. Three years later, here’s Final Fantasy 7: An oral history. Photos: Jonathan Castillo, Irwin Wong
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It takes a lot of people to make a headset. Photo: Irwin Wong
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Last year, I bumped into someone who used the term “white label” to describe his work. I hadn’t heard of it, so I asked and heard about developers who make games but don’t appear in the credits and don’t publicly acknowledge the work. More recently, I decided to look into the idea and see how common it…
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Mario Maker is one of those games I can’t help but want to write about. I love the concept, the nostalgia, and the yellow packaging/branding. So I did a quick story on how Nintendo embraced Mario’s weird side in it.
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I had nothing to do with Brave Wave’s phenomenal Street Fighter soundtrack, but they were nice enough to ask me to write an essay for the booklet, so that counts for something.
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As part of Polygon’s VR cover story, I visited Minority to get a first look at its game about an unlikely love story. Any time a developer references both Ico and LMNO in an interview, they’re probably talking about a game I want to play.
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Recently, I’ve been kicking around the idea of doing a literal day in the life series. Each story would follow someone from the game industry doing something notable, and we’d structure the text with timestamps and random details to play up the timeline. Not sure if I’ll stick with it, but here’s one of them — a…
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My latest weird idea, Polygon’s Indie Developer Science Fair, is a package of 17 projects that we asked developers to make to show their games in creative ways. An augmented reality app, a Twine game, screenshots that work with cardboard 3-D glasses, etc. This partly came about because I’d been building a list of developer requests that…
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At one point Yu Suzuki was arguably the most famous arcade game designer in the world. Now he runs a small production company designed to generate and oversee game concepts. As part of Polygon’s Life in Japan cover, I talked to him about game ideas that never got off the ground and what he wants to do…
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In the late 1980s, Hideo Yoshizawa, Masato Kato and Keiji Yamagishi worked with a small team to create action game Ninja Gaiden for the NES. As part of Polygon’s Life in Japan cover (which also features the debut of Yamagishi’s first single from his new album, and the reveal of a game he’s composing music for), when they…
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For Polygon’s third cover story, I put together an online magazine about Japan’s game industry. It’s fairly common these days to see stories summing up what’s happening in Japan. So I went another direction and decided to focus on specific examples — people struggling to get funding, working with Western publishers, succeeding in mobile, going independent, etc.…
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I tend to like stories about games that have been in development for a long time — seeing what kinds of struggles the developers ran into, what the hardest roadblocks were to overcome. So when BioShock 2 creative director Jordan Thomas co-founded an indie studio and started work on a game about crazy development issues, I…
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I’d wanted to do a story on game industry agents for years, but had always been looking for the right way to do it — as an overview of the industry, focusing on one person, etc. Then last year, Creative Artists Agency reached out about a possible story and we started talking, and I realized there were…
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This is one of those ideas that came up a lot over the years: “Wouldn’t it be fun to dig up the Atari landfill in New Mexico?” I heard it at 1UP. We talked about it at Polygon. And as I learned doing this story, there were a bunch of others interested like Discovery Channel. But it…
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About two years ago, Vanity Fair ran an oral history of The Sopranos. That approach is nothing new and Vanity Fair isn’t the only one doing it, but when I read it I realized I hadn’t seen much of that for games. So I tried to think of a game that would make sense to…
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Awhile back, I saw a magazine story with Matt Stone and Trey Parker drawn as South Park characters. I think it was in Entertainment Weekly, and I wanted to rip it off. I wanted to ask a game studio artist to draw their team’s director in their game’s art style. Then when I started on a feature…
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I suppose you can consider this part two in a series on canceled projects designed to make players cry, following the LMNO story I did at 1UP. With Milo, I was fascinated by the tech and ambition — creating a virtual boy who could talk to players and interact with them through Kinect. It was…
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In 2007, Wired published a cover story on Microsoft Labs’ high tech data crunching and analysis used to support the development of Halo 3. Five years later, with a new development team in charge, I visited to see how the setup had evolved, spending a day with Microsoft’s Eric Schuh during the final campaign playtest for Halo…
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Lawsuits and a falling out with Midway: the story of what happens when a game becomes a phenomenon and not everyone gets paid. Huge thanks to Incredible Technologies VP of marketing Scott Morrison for digging up outtake photos from the 1994 “Daniel Pesina, who starred as Johnny Cage in Mortal Kombat has switched to BloodStorm” print ad. Photo: Scott Morrison
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It’s a lot easier to write a story about someone who make games when he puts himself in the game. Weirdest moment: Going to a Sony press event, seeing a PlayStation-themed alcoholic drink menu with a “Papa & Yo” on it and thinking it was a strange fit for a game about an abusive alcoholic father.…
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This is one of those stories I bothered Sony about for a year before it came together, and then once it came together I had to turn it around in about a day. Just the way it works sometimes, and I was happy that we were able to show Journey‘s evolution through a series of prototype videos…
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Before Street Fighter 2 snowballed the arcade industry, Takashi Nishiyama and his team created a predecessor remembered more for awkward pressure sensitive controls than for the game itself. Nishiyama hadn’t done an interview in 12 years, so I took a shot and reached out. It ended up being extremely popular, covering Nishiyama’s career as he moved…
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At the 2011 Tokyo Game Show, Jeremy Parish, Thierry Nguyen, and I scheduled interviews with developers who had been affected by the 2010 Tohoku earthquake in an effort to see how things had changed a year later. Most were more open than we anticipated. Katsuhiro Harada discussed a scene with a drowning character that his…
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I’ve always liked magazine theme issues — how Esquire does its Meaning of Life installments, or Vanity Fair’s and GQ’s comedy issues, or EDGE’s, EGM’s, and Hyper’s Japan issues. So when I had a chance to organize an issue of 1UP’s short-lived print magazine, I stole that idea. I had a few concepts floating around —…
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With The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay, Starbreeze broke out as a developer, acclaimed for its tech abilities and efforts at telling a story in first-person. Behind the scenes, though, the team struggled to finish that game and others, and went through growing pains, canceled projects, shifting priorities, and staff turnover. I dug…
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LMNO was supposed to be the second game in a three-game deal between Steven Spielberg and Electronic Arts — an ambitious idea featuring a woman named Eve in a first-person adventure designed to make an emotional connection with players. But as the years went on after EA announced the game, the news surrounding it got quieter…
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In 2010, Richard Li and I spent two weeks driving across the U.S., stopping at game developers, publishers, arcades, and whatever we could fit in. We tried to do something different at each stop — playing soccer with Frank O’Connor at 343, testing Kinect with kids at Microsoft, eating tacos with Warren Spector at Junction Point, celebrating…
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EA’s 2010 NBA Jam revival made for a good excuse to do a history feature on the franchise, so I talked to ex-Midway developers about the original game’s development, Acclaim’s former CEO about the license confusion, and people who worked on Acclaim’s less popular series titles. Then EA showed us a bunch of modern prototype stuff to…
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For a brief period at 1UP, Richard Li and I experimented with a video show called Backstage. The idea was to show how game development worked in a more realistic, less sales pitchy format. And it kind of worked — I had a lot of fun sitting in on a focus group for EA’s NBA…
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Prior to Brutal Legend‘s release and 2 Player Productions’ excellent Double Fine documentary, I did a story noting the parallels between Double Fine head Tim Schafer and Brutal Legend star Eddie Riggs, with a bit of a Rolling Stone influence to play up the game’s music roots. Thanks to a couple timely coincidences in the form…
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The blessing and curse of 1UP’s early cover stories was that each ran over the course of five days, which was great in that it forced us to think of alternative content to fill the daily slots, and frustrating in that some days inevitably ended up stronger than others. With this God of War cover, for…
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I’ve always been a sucker for the deleted scenes and bonus features you see on film DVDs, so over the years I’ve often pitched game companies on releasing similar clips. One of my favorites came through as part of a making-of interview with DICE just before its parkour runner Mirror’s Edge shipped, where after a few months of…
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