Interviews// SPOnG Interview: Tetsuya Mizuguchi

SPOnG: What about Xbox Live Arcade? What are your plans for that service?

Tetsuya Mizuguchi: Lumines Live – we want to keep expanding that service, adding songs and skins and so on. Both using unknown and well-known DJs and musicians. Plus making the service more seasonal – music is always moving, like fashion, like in the summertime you want to listen to more reggae music or whatever.

SPOnG: Do you think with, for example, Microsoft’s XNA game design tools, we have a more open and creative atmosphere today for smaller developers than we’ve had in the past?

Tetsuya Mizuguchi: I hope so, I hope so. Five or ten years ago, we only had a few stages (platforms) to work on. Now we have many more stages and audiences, so the middleware is very important to make a bridge. So we always need very good middleware.

SPOnG: What would your advice be to a young person who wants to become a game designer?

Tetsuya Mizuguchi: Don’t think about genre. They should think about ‘what is the future of entertainment?’ I think what we currently understand by ‘the game’ is getting old already.

Thirty years ago we had Pong – just black and white dots, not graphics - then we had colours, then we moved from 2D to 3D… so think of in ten or twenty years time. Surely games will soon be proper ‘movie-quality’ … Which is very different to what we currently understand by a game experience. There really is almost no limit, no border anymore.

So, the freedom of imagination is vital. The next talent should be thinking higher and higher. Then perhaps they should wait a few years to learn how to make some games – I learned from making racing games at Sega. How to make games for people worldwide is key. Don’t care so much about ‘genre’ care more about ‘what is the future?’

SPOnG: Online gaming – currently huge and will continue to grow. World of Warcraft now has over eight million subscribers. Do you have any plans to make online games and can you give us details?

Tetsuya Mizuguchi: Yes, so we are thinking about our future online project now. We are learning about the casual gaming online market. It’s clearly the future. Every content will soon be changed to online content. The packaged game will soon be a thing of the past, perhaps in the next five to ten years.

The people’s wants are changing, this is not coming from the marketing people, but from basic human needs, wants and desires. People want to download and customise content, connect with their friends, meet new people and so on. It’s like the analogy of water in a bucket slowly increasing. The moment at which the water spills out of the bucket is the point at which, for example, the customer makes a decision to buy something.

SPOnG: So you think online users will become creators, as with Spore for example?

Tetsuya Mizuguchi:Yeh, this is the new style of enjoying the game. This is the new element in gaming and interactive entertainment right now.