It's not the kind of hazing you'd expect. No being forced to do a kegstand and hold the seal for the rest of the night, or covering yourself in Icy-Hot and running naked through a KKK rally. No sir. At Capcom, the challenge they give to their newest employees might be even worse. Rather than humiliating themselves physically, fresh recruits at Capcom are forced to endure something much more mentally stressful: creating their own game from scratch, without the wisdom or guidance of the company vets. In an interview with Famitsu magazine, Jun Takeuchi (Resident Evil 5, Lost Planet) discussed the motive behind throwing their greenhorns to the sharks: "Game projects as of late have grown into incredibly huge things in scope. It's hard to produce one game a year the way that people used to be able to do. That got me thinking that perhaps the best way to get our new employees a taste of the peaks and valleys of game development is to have them produce a game of their own by themselves." It's certainly tough love. Like, "'No' means 'Yes'" tough love. "Normally we'd have them be part of a larger team, learning the process bit by bit from veteran employees--a low-risk, low-return method," Jun said, but "there's a limit to what they can get out of that; they wind up not being able to do anything unless someone tells them how to do it." And so the greenhorns put down their best effort, taking a trial-and-error approach to game making on a small scale to start. In the most recent case, a five-person team of nubs put together Planet Work, which launched recently for the iPhone. It's not deep, not compelling--a shallow little space game where you guide a trash collector from planet to planet. But despite its simplicity, the production of it was nothing if not a nightmare of complexity. Here, project leader Kanu Akamatsu talks about how much his hazing hurt: "I felt like we were being cast away. I had no idea what we should make or how we should make it. It was a lot harder than I thought it'd be to get our thoughts together and really work as a team. Being on the side that makes the games instead of play them made me realize how headache-inducing it is when you know the game you're working on isn't fun, but you don't know what you can do to make it better." Now Takeuchi is encouraging iPhone gamers to tear up Planet Work with criticism, because nobody ever bettered their craft being told what they were doing right. It's a harsh lesson in real-world development, but a necessary one to Capcom's outspoken producer. "The game industry is largely being driven by a core group of creators that were born in the 1970s," he said. "I think one of the most important missions of this group is to raise and nurture the next generation of creators." What we need now is that bright hint that there'll be someone else to keep the torch burning when the current reign ends. At least at Capcom, that won't be a problem. http://www.diedagain.com/capcoms-jun-takeuchi-is-molding-the-future-of-the-gaming-industry
Rather than offering assistance, Takeuchi has these recent college graduates handle absolutely everything about their release within the first year of their employment. They're allowed to work as a team, naturally, but they'll see no assistance from the superiors who know better; they handle everything, "from publicity to rights issues," by their lonesome.
A cruel master, maybe, but Takeuchi's concern for the future of the industry is welcome. In a time when giants like Epic's Cliff Bleszinski are encouraging the current crop of developers to be bigger rockstars, it's refreshing to see someone whose forethought will mold today's credit roll throwaways into the "power creatives" of the near-future. Sooner or later, our aging auteurs are going to have to pass the torch, and many of them fail to realize how close they've come to replicating the Khan empire--when the emperor dies, so too do his people wither.
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