Biohazard 2 Misc Section # 5
Interview With The Creators
Another interview with Shinji Mikami (from September 1996) This one is about BH 1 and BH 2 (1.5), thought generally more about BH 1's making. Fun to read for old time Biohazard fans that remember the original game.
First question, Bio Hazard has such a different feel than most Capcom games, can you tell us how the game came about?.
Mikami (M): It was really a top down procedure. The company asked me to make a horror game, something scary that people would enjoy playing. We made a horror game for the 8-bit Famicom, called Sweet Home, which was licensed from a movie. The company wanted to create something with a similar flavor. That was the only instruction we got from the company, so we were able to create this game more freely then usually. When I sat down to plan this game, I was all by myself. I spent about six months planning and structuring the game, and then hired 10 more staff members to begin working on it. We had to spend a long time just trying various things out, because at that time there wasn't the CG technology, and we were doing an original game completely from scratch. So, basically we've spent an entire year of planning and researching. When it was time to actually start developing the game, we added 20 to 30 more staff members, and towards the end we had a total of 50 people working on the project. We've had 18 people in the programming department alone. We could've made a couple of different teams out of our staff (laughs). The game took a total of 2 years and 3 months.
So is Bio Hazard a sequel to Sweet Home?.
M: No it's not a sequel. It does feel a little like Sweet Home. People who have played Sweet Home will no doubt say "Oh, this is like Sweet Home" but we didn't want to make an exact copy or sequel. I wanted to create something more sharp.
Why did you decide to release it on Playstation, and not Sega Saturn?.
It was simply because at the time PS seemed to be the the most appropriate hardware, and the hardware most capable of expressing the image we wanted. That's all, there were no other reasons.
Are there any plans to convert it to Saturn in the future?.
M: There are no plans at the moment.
Do you intend to release many more of this type of game in the future?.
M: I'm certainly not stuck on this particular game engine, but I think there will be a lot of games released in the future that have a similarly cinematic feel. I do intend to make many more games like this in the future, but I am not saying that this is the only type of games we will be making.
Since you've mantioned cinema, are there any particular movies that influenced your creation of this game?.
M: Did you know that George Romero made a zombie movie? It was called Dome of the Dead. I saw it as a junior high school student, and the image is still burnt into my brain. Of course, it was just a movie and I couldn't do anything to recreate it as a game, but it made me daydream about living in a realistic world in which zombies appeared. Like "what if it was me who was in that situation? Well I'd do this, and I'd do that..." I'v daydreamed like this since I was little and I thought "since this is a videogame, wouldn't it's be possible to recreate that?" Of course no one wants to actually live in such a world, and get killed, but with a game it's possible to satisfy your imagination and feel like you're actually experiencing it.
So, that's where your idea come from.
M: That's right. Actually I came up with various other ideas, including a ghost story, but when I thought of making a game out of that zombie movie I saw when I was a kid I knew I had it, I had confidence that this would be a great game because of that movie.
Bio Hazard was really popular in the US and Europe as well, when you were developing it did you think at all about the foreign market?.
M: Well actually no, I didn't think about the foreign market, and because of that I've been told that the dialogue in the game was very strange (laughs) I've heard that a lot, I'll do it properly next time.
We thought it was a bit odd too, was the voice recorded in America?.
M: No, we recorded it in Japan.
But, American voice actors right?.
M: Well the voice actors were American, but the translator was Japanese, so people ended up thinking the dialogue was very unnatural. The other thing is that at first the actors didn't speak very clearly, the US version doesn't have subtitles on the screen like the Japanese one does, so in the English version if you miss hearing an important message, that's it, there is nothing you can do to fix that, we asked the voice actors to speak very slowly and clearly, but that ended up being a negative itself. since I am Japanese I didn't realize how strange it was for them to be speaking so slowly, I was disturbed when I finally noticed that much later.
In an early press interview in Japanese publications, I thought I saw mention of many other weapons, and even kid zombies in earlier versions of the game. What changes were made between the original plan and the final version?.
M: I completely changed the scenario and the whole perspective. At first the game was going to have a 1st-person perspective and be made completely out of polygons, there were a lot of weapons and iteams we planned to put in there as well, which gradually ended up being cut. As far as the kid zombies are concerned, I just thought it was not right to use the kid zombies. I thought it was morally wrong to have such disturbing elements as blowing kid's heads off, even if they were zombies, so I cut them out of the final product.
No one told you to remove it?.
M: No, no one told me anything, I just didn't think people would like that so naturally they won't be in Bio Hazard 2 either.
Is it true that it was the Bio Hazard team who developed the Goof Troop game?.
M: Umm... No, that was only me, there was another person who was with the Bio Hazard team at the beginning, but now I am the only one.
What other games have you made?.
M: Only Aladdin and Goof Troop. But I'm sure that none of those games affected Bio Hazard in any way because I was the only one who worked on them. Actually Bio Hazard is the very first game most of our staff worked on... About 70% of them, so this team was made by a very young staff, thats a good thing and also a bad thing, that's one reason why it was so difficult.
Can you tell us about some of the difficulties you had making Bio Hazard?.
M: If I start talking about it I know I'll be depressed... (laughs) Well the first problem was we couldn't even visualize the actuall schedule, I was very worried about how we'd be able to graphically express the scenes I had drawn in my mind... Our first schedule was 1-1/2 to 2 years, but once we started we ended up spending an enternity planning and running tests much more then we had with other games. We had three major hurdles: No one had worked with the new 32-bit hardware or 3D polygons. And since it was a totally original game, not a sequel or translation we had to do everything from scratch. After stumbling on our tests for so long members of the staff were starting to say "Can this ever really be released as a product?" Are we going to have to close the project and count it all as research?.
And how many copies have you ended up selling?.
M: As of yoday we've sold just over 800,000 copies in Japan alone.
Is Bio Hazard Capcom's best selling 32-bit format title?.
M: Yes, worldwide it's sold more than 1.5 million copies.
Let me start asking Bio Hazard 2 questions. Will this end the series?.
M: Um, I can't say... (laughs) If it sells well I'd like to release some more (laughs).
Will Chris and Jill appear in part 2?.
M: No.
Can you tell us what happened to Chris, Barry, Rebecca and Jill at the end of part one? Did Wesker really die?.
M: All the Bio Hazard 1 characters are in the hospital due to extreme fatigue, whether Wesker is dead or alive is still unclear...
Compared to the original will Bio Hazard 2 have emphasize on puzzle elements or action elements?.
M: Ah, it'll be exactly the same as Bio Hazard 1, with perhaps a bit more emphasis on the action.
How about the lenght of the game?.
M: It's about the same.
Are there more then 2 playable characters?.
M: No, just two.
Since the backgrounds weren't polygons in BH 1, did you think about using polygon backgrounds in BH 2?.
M: No, not at all. Polygon backgrounds don't match what we're trying to do with Bio Hazard at all. By using preset camera angles we can control how things appear... If we made them with full polygons and a free-floating camera the elements of fear would be lost. As it is now it's very easy for us to hide enemies behind corners and such. The control may be a little bit bad, but I think that this is the best way to produce a true feeling of tension.
Is there any part of the game in which you can interact with the background?.
M: In that regard Bio Hazard 2 is about the same as Bio Hazard 1. I would like to make a game in which that were possible... but not for Bio Hazard.
Will you increase the number of zombies and the amount of zombies and ammo?.
M: Yes we plan to add more of both.
Do you use Motion Capture for the character movement?.
M: No, we didn't use it for BH 2, we tried to use it for BH 1 but it wasn't that great, the technology was to new at that time. We could create better movement with our own designers, we can work faster that way. So for BH 1 and BH 2 we're still doing it by hand.
To what do you attribute Bio Hazard's phenomental sales?.
M: This is really the first game in which people can feel like a character in a horror movie, and experience the feeling of actually being in danger. I think that and the high quality graphics and sounds are probably the reasons why people buy Bio Hazard, more so then the actuall gameplay. But this is only half the reason, the other half is just luck (laughs).
What kind of feedback did you get from users?.
M: People thought it had a great element of fear, the minus side were the control the scenario and the English dialogue, these will all be improved in the sequel.
What are your favorite games?
M: I personally like Derby Stallion (Ascii's horse racing strategy game) I used to love the original arcade Gradius too, now I like Mario, Zelda, Final Fantasy, Dragon Quest, really all big titles.
Since you've mentioned Mario and Zelda, what do you think about the N64?.
M: I want them to release more games (laughs).
Any possibility you'll make games on N64?.
I would love to!.
A side note to this interview:
In a interview with Japanese magazine Famicom Tsushin, Capcom development chief Yoshiki Okamoto revealed some of theire future (and past) plans for the Bio Hazard series. Before Capcom began developing Bio Hazard 2 they began production on Bio Hazard: Dash, a semi-sequel to Bio Hazard. It takes place a few years after Bio Hazard when Chris and Jill go to investigate a few zombified plants that are sighted in the area of the Bio Hazard mansion. While using basically the same enviroment (updated with cracks and cobwebs) Dash would have had a few new locations, different enemies and new weapons, unfortunately production was stopped when Capcom decided to make Bio Hazard 2 insteed.
Summary: Well what can we learn from this interview? Nothing really new about version 1.5, but some interesting stuff was mentioned about BH 1, like that Mikami said it is unclear if Wesker really died, was there already plans for this character? We will probably never know...
Go to: Misc Section # 6
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