Inaba On Devil May Cry's Survival Horror Past

simoniker writes "Gamasutra has put up an in-depth interview with former Clover head and Okami co-creator Atsushi Inaba, conducted before the Capcom division was dissolved. Inaba explains exactly how Capcom's Devil May Cry franchise came about: 'I actually did get on the Resident Evil 3 team, but when I joined there was a Resident Evil 1.5 project, which actually became Resident Evil 3. When the PS2 came out, the Resident Evil 3 team's name was changed to the Resident Evil 4 team. That didn't go so well, so we thought — 'what can we do with this,' and Devil May Cry was the result.'" Relatedly, eToyChest has up a great post-mortem of Clover Studios, giving their own reasons why they think the little studio that could was shut down.

Comments

Read the title out loud.

[mctk]

It certainly sounds like a string of random words.

Quality

[Pengunea]

This is a particularly interesting bit from TFA: "That's hard to say...after all, the games that came out in the last two years were made in the last five years"

Inaba makes a good point about quality of games being released at any given time by a company. What I get from this is due to long-term development cycles on games it becomes very difficult to trace the "good game" decisions at a granular level. That can make for risky business if a sequel is developed before it's determined the original game is popular enough to turn profit.

Onimusha roots

[hansamurai]

I'll have to look into this, but I was always under the impression that Devil May Cry originally came from another Capcom game, Onimusha. During the development of that game, which is 99% sword combat, they found a bug in the combat which vaulted an enemy up into the air where the player could continually slash away at them while they floated there. This led to the Devil May Cry combat engine where you could knock enemies into the air and shoot at them quickly.

I swear I've known this since for years probably from some gaming magazine, and the Devil May Cry Wikipedia article mentions it briefly, but doesn't imply that the entire game was built from this.