yoshiki okamoto
Former Capcom Employee Talks Sexuality of Street Fighter IV Developer’s President
10:00PM Brian Ashcraft | Developer Dimps is responsible for developing Street Fighter IV for Capcom. Dimps president Takashi Nishiyama? “Pretty sure bisexual,” outs former Capcom employee Yoshiki Okamoto. More »
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Folklore Dev Was Working On Tom And Jerry For Brash
11:00AM Michael McWhertor | Game Republic, (in)famous for its work on Genji and Folklore, as well as its founder Yoshiki Okamoto, was working on a Tom and Jerry game tie-in with an upcoming movie, according to a new interview. More »
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Why Isn’t Grand Theft Auto HUGE In Japan?
8:00PM Brian Ashcraft | Game developer Yoshiki Okamoto is best known for his years at Capcom, where he worked on titles like Gyruss and Forgotten Worlds as well as his involvement in Final Fight and Street Fighter II. He’s an industry vet and has been around. When he looks at the current Japanese game landscape, Okamoto says there’s at least one thing that does not compute: More »
Microsoft Passed On Genji Dev’s Other Xbox 360 Exclusive
11:30AM Michael McWhertor | Believe it or not, Genji developers Game Republic made a game for Microsoft that it thought was worse than Every Party, the team’s lame duck party game that never made it out of Japan. Game Republic president and former Capcom designer Yoshiki Okamoto tells 1UP that the Folklore devs were nine months into a project that Microsoft just wasn’t interested in. Okamoto theorises that Microsoft had simply given up on the Japanese market. After showing their follow up to Every Party to Microsoft, the publisher passed. But development continued at Game Republic, hoping that the company would come around. Okamoto calls the gamble “a major mistake for us and a bad move for our company early on”. What we’re interested in knowing is how this mystery title could be any more unappealing that both Genji games? A question for the ages, we suppose. Game Republic’s Canceled Xbox 360 Game [1UP] More »
‘Western Games Are More Advanced Than Japanese’
11:20PM Brian Ashcraft | Gloom and doom time. Well, for Japanese game developers. While the country’s game makers seems to be down on themselves of late, it’s hard to separate that from stereotypical Japanese humility and plain old self-realisation. Here’s Genji developer Game Republic head and former Capcom producer Yoshiki Okamoto talking about whether Japan can catch up with the West: It’s almost too late. During the Famicom (NES) era, Japanese video games comprised 70 percent of all video games. And currently, it’s like 15 or 20 percent, isn’t it? Now, Western games are more advanced. For games like GTAIV, those guys are spending something like 5 or 10 years to make them. Even if we thought about catching up with them now, they’d still be making progress. But, not necessarily giving up, it’s just not possible to catch up in a single lifetime. Man, that Okamoto, talk about a downer. Chin up, Japan, chin up. 「日本はもうゲーム先進国ではない」 [IT Media via 痛いニュース] [Pic] More »
Okamoto Warns Of Atari Calibre DS Crash
9:40AM Michael McWhertor | Game Republic’s Yoshiki Okamoto, a twenty year industry vet whose credits include Street Fighter II, Resident Evil and, more recently, Folklore, tells Gamasutra he fears the Japanese game industry may be in danger of suffering the same fate that befell Atari in the early ’80s. If you’re too young to remember, a glut of software for the Atari 2600 and its peers, the majority of which we’ll be nice enough to describe as liquid faeces written in assembler, flooded the market, resulting in a industry crushing crash. Today’s problem? A glut of software—particularly “brain” games—for the Nintendo DS published by inexperienced companies looking to make a quick buck. More »
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