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Tango interview from Xbox Wire is great.
At the time I heard about Hi-Fi Rush being submitted amongst other concepts, I thought that this was the one that Tango would not choose. I thought it was a joke and I was surprised that it got chosen [laughs]. When that happened, I learned that I need to be humble. Because as Nakamura-San and John started to work on it — I could see them working hard on it – I learned that it was not a joke, and this is something that [needed] to be taken seriously.
I didn’t really create the team. It was just the people who were available. And all the people who were available had literally no experience making a game like this. So, it’s not like, “I’m going to need him, and him, and him because they know how to do this and this and they’re going to make it happen.” It was, “Here’s what we want to do,” and everyone’s like, ‘I have no idea how to do this.’ Most of the first reactions were, “We don’t know how to do this; this is totally impossible.”
John and Nakamura-san were [the only] two people working on it and everybody else in the studio was working on Ghostwire: Tokyo, myself included. I was asked to help on it when I had time available, kind of like a part-time thing; to help when you can. But as we started seeing John and Nakamura-san iterating on their work, and being very creative, and seeing how they were improving on what they’d been creating, people tended to gravitate toward that creative excitement. The strength of the creativity there helped bring in a lot of people.
The core of the game is rhythm action. But as I talked to John initially — and John was very passionate about the rhythm action portion of the game — I was saying stuff like, “No, you must choose between rhythm or action. You can’t have both.” John kept saying, “It’s not one or the other, both are important,” and everybody said, “You must choose one,” and he’s like, “No, no, no, no, no, no.” It took a while before we were able to understand what he was really going after, but once we saw it, it dawned on us that John’s sensibilities to capture that so early on, in something that might be fun, was pretty amazing.
He’s really the type of guy that didn’t want to bend his core vision. And I could tell by listening and watching him talk to other people, and others would come to him with ideas, and sometimes those ideas would help that for vision; sometimes they wouldn’t. But he would listen, and I would see him struggling internally, trying to find ways to make it so that those other ideas could still live without having to change that core vision.
There was a department head in Hi-Fi Rush that really fits this description. One could say that John was kind of like Zanzo (laughs).
Some people might take that as stubborn. Others might take that as somebody who’s confident with his vision, who wants to realize that vision. And I felt like I could trust him a lot more because I saw him do that. Here was something that he was willing to really stick to his guns to, that he strongly believed in, and that was something that I wanted to support. So that was how our relationship kind of grew to becoming a very trusting relationship.
Everybody was inspired by the good work of each other. And that good synergy was there; we all wanted to make a good, awesome game. Because of that love and desire, we could see what John was trying to achieve. If he came to the table with something that was too large to achieve, we would be able to take that essence of what he was thinking and create a counterproposal to what he was trying to do and find ways to still get what he wants, but in a more manageable way.
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What a team to put together such a brilliant title with so little experience on this type of game.
Good on John for sticking to his vision.
If I see the 20th Resident Evil 4 Remaster/Remake in GOTY instead of Hi-Fi Rush...
