Shinji Mikami and Goichi Suda are two titans of Japanese game development with some incredible games between them, incl…
Shinji Mikami and Goichi Suda are two titans of Japanese game development with some incredible games between them, including the likes of Resident Evil, Dino Crisis, and Killer 7.
Known for their somewhat punk attitude, the pair joined forces on Shadows of the Damned, released on PS3 and Xbox 360 back in 2011. Now it’s getting re-released as Shadows of the Damned: Hella Remastered.
That afforded me some time at Gamescom to speak to Mikami and Suda about their work together, the importance of remasters as part of game preservation, and if there are any games from their past they’d be keen to remake. They certainly had a lot of banter between them.
And of course, I had to ask Mikami about a new Dino Crisis game too.
Shadows of the Damned: Hella Remastered – Release Date Announcement Trailer Shadows of the Damned: Hella Remastered – Release Date Announcement TrailerWatch on YouTube
How has it been working together again on Shadows of the Damned? It seems like, from the trailer [above] with all the different job titles, you have a very distinct sense of humour.
Suda: Actually, it’s simply a remaster of the original, and as far as all the actual development work and everything, that’s all been done by us at Grasshopper. Mikami is pretty much coming along with us for promotions, like a special guest, doing interviews and stuff like that. So it’s not that we worked together doing the remaster. It’s mostly a Grasshopper thing, but he’s come along for the ride.
When we made the trailer, we decided to screw around a bit, and add the names in a bunch of times and a bunch of different job titles. For Mikami the way we did it was with each title it gets more and more impressive. And for the Suda titles, they get more and more low level and crappy. We just decided to have a bit of fun with that and we thought it worked out pretty well.
What has this remaster allowed you to achieve that you couldn’t when you made it previously?
Suda: One of the things we were able to add to the remaster is the new costumes for Garcia, the main character, and one of them is called Demonio Garcia, which is basically Garcia kind of demonised. This is something we wanted to do with the original game, something that was influenced by Mikami’s God Hand where enemies power up as they go along. And originally I thought, ‘Oh, I’d like to do this with Garcia as well’. But when we made the original version, we simply didn’t have the time to add that in. So it got scrapped. But this time we were able to add that. And so for that specific costume, Garcia not only has a different costume, but he actually also powers up a bit too. Another thing we originally wanted to go with, but weren’t able to, was New Game Plus. Once you clear the game you’ll be able to start over from the beginning with all the different power ups and weapons that you had when you finished. Those are the two main things that we really wanted to do with the original and we’re finally able to realise now.
