Rooftop Shouting

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.

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.

http://www.polygon.com/features/2016/11/21/13696872/last-guardian-spiritual-successor-vane-mare

It takes a lot of people to make a headset.

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. It just fits. So I did a quick story on how Nintendo embraced Mario’s weird side in it.

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.  

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…

Katsuhiko Hayashi is editor-in-chief of Weekly Famitsu, Japan’s biggest game magazine. As part of Polygon’s Life in Japan cover, I talked to him about the differences between Japanese and Western game media.

While many people know Katsuhiro Harada as the face of Tekken, he has his hand in a lot more that that these days. As part of Polygon’s Life in Japan cover, I talked to him about Tekken, Summer Lesson and the games he wants to make before he retires.

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…

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…

Often referred to as “the indie game from former The Last Guardian developers,” Vane looks to be quite interesting in its own regard. As part of Polygon’s Life in Japan cover, I talked to the team behind it about the benefits and challenges of coming up in that shadow.

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.…

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…

At E3 this year, Ubisoft flew in Tetris license holders Alexey Pajitnov and Henk Rogers to promote the latest version of the game, all tied up around this being Tetris’ 30th anniversary. I took the opportunity to talk to Rogers about his plans to change the world, and how they want to turn Tetris into a virtual…

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…

I didn’t plan this, but over the past year I’ve basically done a series of ‘where are they now’ stories on former Capcom employees. First was Tatsuya Minami talking about Platinum Games. Then Yoshiki Okamoto on Game Republic. Then Akira Nishitani and others talking about Street Fighter. And now in the final one of these…

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…

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…

When developer Game Republic shut down in 2011, rumors suggested it wasn’t under the best of circumstances. So two years later, I tried to figure out what happened, getting company head Yoshiki Okamoto’s side of the story and interviewing others about the situation. Okamoto is a magnet for urban legends and it’s not always easy to sort when he’s…

As the head of Osaka’s critically acclaimed developer Platinum Games, Tatsuya Minami’s role is mostly business these days, but his creative roots go back to Capcom in the ’80s. I talked to him about heading up Super Ghouls ‘n Ghosts, steering Platinum, and how he stepped away from designing games himself to help Platinum make better products.

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…

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.

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.…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…