News: Takayoshi Sato interview

August 25, 2005, 04:35 PM

by brandon, via Takayoshi Sato -
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Of all of the interviews I've done in recent months, this is my personal favorite. Takayoshi Sato created all of the CG for Silent Hill 1 on his own, and is the principal person responsible for the story, art direction, and some of the gameplay in Silent Hill 2. Recently, his work has been a bit more entrenched, with his latest work being in Goldeneye: Rogue Agent, for EA. This is one of the most candid explanations of the japanese game industry inner-workings that I've seen, and is even quite honest about what it's like to work in a behemoth american company. Here's an excerpt.

"Not many people believe that I did it myself – and it wasn’t like I wanted to make it all from scratch! I just had to do it in order to get credit. Plus, you don’t want to be credited in your game as assistant artist if you did everything. So it wasn’t easy. I didn’t go home for three years, almost. I lived there. I slept under the desk, and that midnight time I talked about, after everyone went home, was a real chance for me to work, because I had access to all of the computers in the office. We had over 150 computers or something like that, and at the time we were using the Unix operating system. So after everyone’s gone home, I can operate all of these computers to render my stuff. Yeah…I couldn’t go home."

And if you check his personal site, you'll see his early work on goldeneye. At the top, you see the final model, but take a look at his earlier ideas. Now that's a character caught between worlds, who's fighting against his friends, as the protagonist is supposed to be, eh?