George Kamitani 4gamer Interview Outline page 1

Got his start in the gaming sector in high school during the Famicom heyday when a friend at a software company gave him a part-time job doing pixel art. He tricked his parents into saying okay by saying it would improve his mathematics grades.

Later entrusted with doing porting work to different consoles. Did the graphics for Famicom port of AD&D Hillstar.

Moved to Osaka from Hiroshima after college and applied to Nintendo, Capcom, etc. Went with Capcom which was really thriving then under Executive VP Yoshiki Okamoto (Time Pilot, Sonson director)

At Capcom, entered as a planner in order to see how games were built from ground up, around 1992-1993 when SF II was a huge hit. When he entered the company, his department was mostly working on side-scrolling action games.

Worked on Muscle Bomber, heavy on the throwing techniques, making for complicated graphics--putting different graphical parts together and animating. This experience was important in developing Vanillaware's 2D tools later on.

Worked on D&D Tower of Doom after Muscle Bomber, on red dragon and stage layouts. Lots of fun, and wished he'd been on project at start rather than mid-way through. This shows in Dragon's Crown, too.

Left Capcom after feeling he could never direct there--too many talented people. Invited by an old upperclassman from school to join a small game company in Kansai that formerly did adult games but that was diversifying. Started building the foundation of what would become Princess Crown there.

Princess Crown originally from idea of making a Princess Maker 2-type of "raise your character" game with many endings. Character training/raising sections would be replaced by fighting action sections instead.

Strong RPG elements in Princess Crown because when shopping the game to Sega, it was assumed that it was an RPG, and he answered yes, of course, it will have 40 hours of playtime!---Sega really needed RPG's for the battle with Sony (Saturn vs. PS) then. Talked with his two main programmers on the train back and said that they'd really need to make it an RPG now that they'd said it was one.

Entered development at the end of 1995 but problems a year later because the development company went bankrupt. A friend at Sega introduced him to Atlus, which totally saved him and the project. Deep appreciation for them still.

At the end of project, rather than Vanillaware becoming a smaller unit of Atlus, all of the development members scattered, so later Vanillaware games with entirely new staff. 10 years later, still hard to make games now!

After being saved by Atlus, he became a staff member there at "Atlus Kansai" (Atlus Osaka Development Office, from which some members later broke off to form Noise Factory). Was very attached to his Princess Crown team and always wanted to make another work and thought of Dragon's Crown at that time. However, Atlus Kansai dissolved soon after.

Though Princess Crown was highly praised, it came at the end of the Saturn's life and sales weren't huge---bankruptcy of the development company was a big loss, too. Princess Crown was branded as a "red ink project"/money-loser and people who worked on it weren't looked upon favorably.

He really wanted to keep his team together and make even better things with them, but he didn't have the grit or the guts to start his own company at that time. An Osaka development company called Racjin took on his team members.

So, after Princess Crown, there was no sort of "Team Kamitani" around to make games.

Later invited to Tokyo by Shigeo Komori, who helped with Princess Crown development, and went to work at Sony Computer Entertainment in Tokyo (Kamitani's work at Sony is not well-known and much of it is confidential). Wanted to do game planning there but the team he assembled ended up in pieces.

In the end, he and Ohnishi (current Vanillaware programmer) were the only ones left, in dire straits with no money, living on 200 yen a day and eating bread ends. This was 2001 and he was 32 then. Couldn't just go back to Osaka with no job so stayed in Tokyo, got introduced to a job that would become involved in development of Fantasy Earth~The Ring of Dominion (MMO). His involvement shifted the world theme from a humans vs. vampires thing into a more princess/fantasy thing. His team that was contracted for this work was an early version of Vanillaware.

This was his most harrowing project. He owes a lot to Shigatake (now a Vanillaware illustrator), who at the time told Kamitami he was in love with Princess Crown---Kamitani says he "tricked" poor Shigatake into joining the project based on this!

I've did a quick rundown of about half of Impress' Interview Page 2, hopefully the other half later.

Vanillaware gets established soon after Kamitani leaves the Fantasy Earth project. Princess Crown 2--later to be known as Odin Sphere, started out with only 5 developers. Only two members, Kamitani & Nishii, were from the original Princess Crown. Despite Kamitani's bad credentials doing no help to gather people up for his suspicious company (He was only known for Princess Crown til then), his staff eventually grew to 10 members.

His reputation really didn't help him to get a funding from Atlus either. When he proposed Odin Sphere to them, a lot of voices were heard in the company saying that it's a bad decision considering that Princess Crown was a flop and Kamitani hasn't even made a new game in 7-8 years. Their R&D cheif decided to go with it though, and the proposal miraculously went through.

Everything went smoothly with Odin Sphere except for its schedule. But that alone brought down Atlus' trust, and after development was finished, they refused to begin talks on a new project until they see how well the game will do. What's more, Atlus was going to delay the game's sale to accomodate their release schedule. Given that Vanillaware needed money to keep alive, Kamitani had to seek around for new funds. This led to Nipponichi Software's Grimgrimoire and Marvelous AQL's Oboro Muramasa.

By the time Grimgrimoire was completed, Vanillaware was so dead out of funds that Kamitani had to personally borrow money. About 20 million yen. He went so mental that the ceiling looked like it was morphing whenever he lied down.

Odin Sphere came to the rescue. Atlus had set its loyalties pretty high that Kamitani got enough money to pay back his debt and even give bonuses to his workers. Still, Vanillaware was down to its knees again by the time that Oboromuramasa was done.

His company just ignores deadlines and keeps working until its funds run out. That hasn't changed even as of now. It's bad practice as a company, but Kamitani is just happy being able to make games. Given that Vanillaware has more employees now, he realizes that he needs to reconsider his dangerous approach-- even though Vanillaware exists to make games, doing so til' money runs dry is simply not ideal.

Here are quick outlines of page 3 of the Kamitani interview.

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Reason he doesn't do sequels is that he can't usually, so he makes games such that they're stuffed full of all the ideas he wanted to have, with no potential for regrets over things left out. Dragon's Crown is one such game, where he's completely exhausted all the ideas he wanted and implemented them, so that it'd be hard to make a sequel quickly even if asked.

Agrees that it's unusual for an independent developer to be able to continue to make originals rather than sequels, suggesting that Princess Crown's influence was probably there---even if it didn't sell well, it was critically acclaimed within the industry.

Vanillaware is now trusted to create originals that also make money, which enables them to keep creating originals, with everyone's support. He has never had any intention of taking on work for other companies because he believes most strongly of all in creating original games.

Right now, there are 24 people at Vanillaware, slowly transitioning so they can have two lines of 12 people on 2 projects. Odin Sphere was 12, Oboro Muramasa was 16.

As for Kamitani's direct work, he does the overall design, character and monster drawing, and scenario writing. But everyone at Vanillaware does all kinds of jobs.

Wants to keep making consumer-oriented games (i.e. for gamers) as opposed to smart phone games, seeing as he worked so hard to have his own company.

FINALLY TALKING ABOUT DRAGON'S CROWN NOW

Dragon's Crown is Vanillaware's largest-scale production, not something they could normally make. It was a long and meandering road, taking 4 years to make. Everything they could think of was put into the game.

Originally meant to be published by UK-based UTV Ignition but then given to Atlus, with some risk that the project would be frozen because UTV was no longer involved. Kamitani felt strongly about this project, though, begging Atlus for help, which decided to bring the money.

Dragon's Crown is just packed with things he liked, everything he was hoping for pretty much got put in. The game system, the art, the game book style [does this mean like in Odin Sphere? I don't know.--edit: oh wait, he must mean the "choose your own adventure" style of branching stories.], monsters, scenario events. Now that he's made this game, he can die happy. Not that he wants to die yet----even when his game designs weren't going forward, he always was making planning documents and has tons of other ideas he wants to do. There's at least 10 that he still wants to do most of all.