[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9lHhBQJ4gYE[/youtube]
One Namco Bandai engineer I spoke to had a decided view on this year’s Tokyo Game Show: “Capcom were the winners.”
With Monster Hunter 3, Street Fighter 4 and Resident Evil 5 all likely to meet critical and commercial success, that is hard to dispute. It also reflects both the risks that one of Japan’s largest game companies has taken to develop new franchises, and its determination to make games for the world rather than concentrate on a specific region or console.
Another part of Capcom’s strategy is to spin off films and other media based on its games. TGS saw the premiere of one such film, the animated zombie feature Resident Evil: Degeneration, which features classic bad movie dialogue such as this:
COMMANDER: “Is it too much to hope you at least have some sort of a plan!?”
LEON: “Shoot them in the head.”
It therefore seems unlikely that Degeneration will break the run of dire videogame-to-movie conversions. But rather than simply cashing in, Capcom has strategic reasons to make films that are linked to the wider problems of the Japanese game market.
Capcom’s president, Haru Tsujimoto, explains it like this: “In Japan the volume zone [for videogames] is middle and high school students, but in Europe and the US the volume zone is higher, people in their 20s. Japanese companies have to develop for their teenage market, whereas the twenty-somethings in Europe and the US have money in their pockets.
“We must attract Japanese players in their 20s as well, but people who first played Biohazard [the Japanese name for Resident Evil] at high school 12 years ago are now grown up and maybe think that games are for children. We hope that people will look at the Biohazard film and realise that technology has advanced and that the game they used to play is now very much like a film.”
Capcom’s strategy is to partner with Hollywood studios rather than take the creative and financial risk of making films itself, and it is systematically reviewing its game portfolio for movie-making opportunities.
Most Japanese videogame companies preach the gospel of convergence – that the gaps between different kinds of media will gradually disappear – but Capcom is being unusally proactive. Now all it needs to do is make the world’s first good movie to ever come out of a videogame…
