Interesting blog article from Capcom's svensson (I give him massive props for his interactions on capcom's forum).
http://blog.capcom.com/archives/565#more-565
Its an interesting look behind the scenes in how they decided to remake Okami for the wii.
Some excerpts:
One of the major ones (and certainly not the only one), as we saw it, was where Okami arrived in the PS2 lifecycle. Having done the analysis in the past of in which years new IP performs best (and worst), it’s not surprising that it’s not later in the hardware lifecycle, where the active consumers tend to be more price and brand sensitive.
Wii had shipped about six weeks earlier and I think it’s fair to say, it was exceeding our expectations at the time (though that really wasn’t a major factor in the decision).
Note that this gives an interesting look into the product life cycle. They were already considering this in Dec of 07 and it'll be released Q1 '08 so this indicates even for a port (good port), it can take a year already from concept to release.
Our green light process is a bit lengthy. We have multiple levels of approvals internally, numbers have to be generated, project specifications created and in this case, we wanted to have the RAD guys come up and have a look at the assets to see if it was even technically possible. That happened a few weeks later, in April 07.
So a lot of the actual proof of concept work only got started in April 07, indicating technical work and progress for a port is slightly less than a year in this case.
I think it was somewhere in May when we received permission to move forward with the full project by our board of directors. Some weeks after that, the team had established technical feasibility and both RAD and Capcom were up for moving to the next level.
As we’ve stated before, Okami is such a huge game (40+ hours to complete isn’t at all uncommon), we aren’t currently planning any additional content but we’re exploring a few possible things on the technical side of things that might make for an improved Wii experience (no promises yet though). Obviously, the biggest change to the game will be the introduction of the Wii motion controls, the details of which we’ll also share at a later date.
In the mean time, the game is on schedule for release in Spring of 2008 and I’m sure you’ll be hearing more from Capcom and Ready at Dawn as we bring new updates closer to release.
