An interview I found interesting about the game:
http://blogs.ign.com/Ubi_Naruto/2007/10/04/68096/
Thursday, October 04, 2007
Believe It
"Hi everyone, my name is Masao Kobayashi, and I am a license coordinator at Ubisoft working on Naruto: Rise of a Ninja. My role is to manage the interaction with Japanese licensor and submitting game assets. I grew up in Japan so manga and anime have always been a big part of my life. It’s really a dream come true for me to be working with Shueisha and Studio Pierrot since I grew up reading and watching titles they made like Dragon Ball, Slam Dunk, Yuyu Hakusho, etc.
As a license coordinator my responsibility varies from day to day. One day I could be working with character modelers to get every character just right or I could be flying to Japan to meet with our licensor. I really enjoyed working on this project because I hardly ever did the same thing two days in a row. In the end I really have to say I have a pretty sweet job. I get to fly around the world, work on a video game and hang out with the creators of Naruto. People sometimes ask how I got my job, so here’s my story: I was offered the job when I was working as a translator at Ubisoft in San Francisco. They were looking for someone who knew Japanese and English and knew a lot about video games and anime. In short, I got the job because I was a huge nerd who knew how to translate. So all of you guys out there that think you can’t work in video games because you’re not an artist or a programmer don’t give up hope. There all kinds of different job in video games.
Working with Shueisha and Studio Pierrot has been a very interesting experience. They are rather known to be one of the strictest licensors out there so I knew it wasn’t going to be easy. As we expected it was not an easy ride. Some character models had to be submitted and revised 5 times, and some story boards had to redone quite a few times. But now that it’s all over I really think that their strictness had a very positive impact on the game. Our character models looked pretty good to start with but after the revisions they look exactly like the anime. They really help us in pushing the quality and authenticity of the game to the next level.
I really want everyone to know that this game was really a labor of love. The majority of us on the team are huge Naruto fans and we wanted to create best Naruto game we possibly could. We really loved making this game and I hope you guys can enjoy it as well. "
