Tetsuya Mizuguchi
Q Entertainment
Art vs Commerce
We are always fighting between these aspects: want to create something new, but have to get more money for the company.
1972: Pong – US game, but played it first in Tokyo. Black and white and simple beep sounds but an inspiration to see moving. Pong + Beatles.
1990: Joined a Sega. Sonic on the Megadrive. Seeing the R360 was a huge surprise, didn’t even know about it despite Sega making it. Wanted to make entertainment, not art, so decided to go into the game industry. Go into this industry to watch the future.
Media improving through technical development, color & sound in movies. Games developing similarly.
1994: Sega Rally – first game project he worked on. How to make the game as real as possible? Using the real cars from the real car industry. Toyota: no way! But the real car engineers, etc blown away to see what was possible with this. 12,000 arcade units sold, 1.5 million software units sold.
1996: Sega Rally Special Stage : real car on a movement platform and huge screen. Expensive, 1 million dollars. 4 units.
2000: Space Channel 5: Make a cartoon style to combine music and game. Use memory and rhythm.
2001: Rez: Too artistic, not enough commerce? Needed to make this game. Inspirations from paintings, music, synaesthesia. “sensorama”. Watching people at clubs and their reactions to music, DJs. Quantized programming. No rhythm skill required but you can still make music.
2003: Left Sega to form Q Entertainment with Shuji Utsumi. Businessman to match the artistic side.
Lumines: puzzle + music. Same theory of sound quantization. Lumines 2 combined with music videos. Lumines Live: expansion packs via DLC.
2005: N3 – Ninety Nine Nights. Combine movie experience and game experience. Rashomon multiple points of view. Drama experience, but not like a movie. Play every point of view. Cinematic experience. After you play through as the humans, you can see the story from the goblins point of view where now the heroes are the villains. Complex story from each Justice.
How Q sees the future: Online + game + music + movie + community + ad > web 2.0 game 3.0 hybrid product for the mass audience.
2007 Genki Rockets: music video from Lumines 2, first human being born in outer space, what does her POV look like, watching the blue planet. She is the new generation of consciousness. Live Earth concert – does a game company do concerts? Computer generated opening to the Live Earth concert, part of physical installation with lasers and LEDs. Live Earth Tokyo, she introduced Al Gore (holographic / digital version).
Games are a baby industry still. Whats happening 20-30 years in the future? Photorealistic images. What kind of entertainment can we design? Games are entertainment, not art but we need an artistic approach to open the next gate to the next age.