BIOHAZARD in Raccoon City Incident
Mid-August
Chris discovers the existence of the G-Virus and reports it to Jill.
July 9th
Due to the accident in the Arklay Mountains district and frequent occurrences of missing persons, the mountain path's closed. A formal decision's made on the interjection of the special forces unit S.T.A.R.S. belonging to the R.P.D. (Raccoon Police Department).
August 17th
According to Chris' Diary, mysterious cases occur frequently in Raccoon City before this date. Testimonies of monsters being seen one after another proves the influences of contaminants discharged from the Underground Laboratory have already begun to appear.
August 21st
Some police and mass media begin investigating Umbrella. The Umbrella faction makes moves towards camouflaging and shuts down the sewage plant.
Mid-September
In Umbrella, a special commando unit led by HUNK infiltrates Raccoon City to seize the G-Virus.
September 15th
A dispatch request falls upon the U.B.C.S. for evacuation of Raccoon citizens.
September 23rd
A large-scale accidental outbreak of the t-Virus occurs in the sewer. Levels of contaminants beyond comparison with anything until now spread into the city and cause a mass outbreak of Zombies.
September 26th
A group of Zombies attacks the police station, resulting in many casualties. At the same time, the U.B.C.S. descends into Raccoon City to begin a rescue mission.
September 28th
Michael Festival. Caught in the incident, Jill Valentine begins moving to escape Raccoon City.
September 29th
Leon S. Kennedy arrives in Raccoon City. At the same time, Claire Redfield also arrives in the city. On the same day, Jill's infected with the virus in battle with the Pursuer (Nemesis) and loses consciousness.
September 30th
Early in the morning, Leon, Claire and Sherry escape from Raccoon City.
October 1st
Jill regains consciousness through a vaccine obtained by Carlos and again plans to escape from Raccoon City. On the same day, the "Sterilization Strategy" by the President and Congress shifts to the execution stage and a Raccoon City strike by the U.S. Army is decided. Umbrella abandons their lobbying efforts. Evacuation orders are handed down to all Supervisors.
October 2nd
Jill and Carlos escape together with Barry Burton in a rescue helicopter. The U.S. Army initiates the Sterilization Strategy at the same time and a missile is launched.
And early this morning, Raccoon City vanishes from the earth...
Mid-August
Chris discovers the existence of the G-Virus and reports it to Jill.
July 9th
Due to the accident in the Arklay Mountains district and frequent occurrences of missing persons, the mountain path's closed. A formal decision's made on the interjection of the special forces unit S.T.A.R.S. belonging to the R.P.D. (Raccoon Police Department).
August 17th
According to Chris' Diary, mysterious cases occur frequently in Raccoon City before this date. Testimonies of monsters being seen one after another proves the influences of contaminants discharged from the Underground Laboratory have already begun to appear.
August 21st
Some police and mass media begin investigating Umbrella. The Umbrella faction makes moves towards camouflaging and shuts down the sewage plant.
Mid-September
In Umbrella, a special commando unit led by HUNK infiltrates Raccoon City to seize the G-Virus.
September 15th
A dispatch request falls upon the U.B.C.S. for evacuation of Raccoon citizens.
September 23rd
A large-scale accidental outbreak of the t-Virus occurs in the sewer. Levels of contaminants beyond comparison with anything until now spread into the city and cause a mass outbreak of Zombies.
September 26th
A group of Zombies attacks the police station, resulting in many casualties. At the same time, the U.B.C.S. descends into Raccoon City to begin a rescue mission.
September 28th
Michael Festival. Caught in the incident, Jill Valentine begins moving to escape Raccoon City.
September 29th
Leon S. Kennedy arrives in Raccoon City. At the same time, Claire Redfield also arrives in the city. On the same day, Jill's infected with the virus in battle with the Pursuer (Nemesis) and loses consciousness.
September 30th
Early in the morning, Leon, Claire and Sherry escape from Raccoon City.
October 1st
Jill regains consciousness through a vaccine obtained by Carlos and again plans to escape from Raccoon City. On the same day, the "Sterilization Strategy" by the President and Congress shifts to the execution stage and a Raccoon City strike by the U.S. Army is decided. Umbrella abandons their lobbying efforts. Evacuation orders are handed down to all Supervisors.
October 2nd
Jill and Carlos escape together with Barry Burton in a rescue helicopter. The U.S. Army initiates the Sterilization Strategy at the same time and a missile is launched.
And early this morning, Raccoon City vanishes from the earth...
INTERVIEW: SHINJI MIKAMI (p.048-052)
BIOHAZARD General Producer
Shinji Mikami's BIOHAZARD World
Mikami-san, you're one of CAPCOM's dyed-in-the-wool employees, aren't you?
Hahaha, "dyed-in-the-wool" sounds good, but ultimately I worked my way up.
What kind of games did you do before you made BIOHAZARD?
Before BIO, I made about 4-5 games. When I joined the company, the first thing they made me do was Game Boy software. My debut game was a black-and-white Game Boy quiz game called "Hatena? no Daibouken." My superiors told me "make it in a month", but I think it took me about three months.
That's preposterous.
When I joined the company, they told me the production period for NES software generally took about six to eight months. Then when I asked my boss at the time, "Could it be done in a month?" he paused and replied, "Sure, you're up to the task aren't you?"... They set me up (laughs).
Still though, three months is a short time.
It was a "What's one meg?" kind of era. But we actually finished the game in two months. In fact, it was billed as "CAPCOM's first online competitive game", so it took a long time to check over and we had to delay the release by another month. That was torture though. We were on the verge of cancelling development.
What about the second game?
The second game was called "Roger Rabbit." A video game adaptation of the Disney movie. It was an action-adventure game, also in black and white, for the Game Boy. And then this one was only sold overseas and was terribly tread on internally. My boss said to me, "After that quiz game, your next games won't sell in Japan." I did it all myself, from the scenario to everything, in five months, but in the middle of the game, five staff members working on the game got pulled out by another department, two for the characters and one for the backgrounds. With the background staff taken away, in the end, the character staff had to work on the backgrounds for the first time. Nevertheless I had to do both jobs, so I was very overwhelmed and even had to use my personal computer to steadily itemize the background block data and the cellular data. By then I'd already faced awfully bad experiences.
Was it well received internally?
Yes. I think I finally got a little bit of recognition afterwards. At the time, CAPCOM was sponsoring F3 and they wanted to do a Formula One racing game next. This time it was on the Super Nintendo. I loved racing so much, so I was like, "Hooray!" but after about eight months, development was discontinued. Well, that was my mistake. I was too picky about what I wanted to do with it, "It's not my idea of F1 unless it's of this quality and expression," and although the programmers were forced to do everything, I put a lot of pressure on them. Whenever the staff would say, "We can't do this any more," I'd say, "Well, we'd better drop it then," or something like that, and then it really was dropped (laughs).
Had the technology at that point not caught up with you in the end?
Well, there was that, but the game was still in its infancy and there were certain parts of it we just couldn't compromise on. Those parts didn't go well so we had to cease development, which I was forced to pay for. I was given a game called "Pumping World", and issued the job of porting the arcade game "Super Pan" in three months. If we didn't make it in three months, we wouldn't be able to recoup the money from the F1 game, so it being done in three months was imperative.
What happened after you paid the bill for ceasing development?
It was another Disney production, this time with Goofy the dog as the main character. That was about ten and a half months later, I think. It was also an action-adventure game, with a bit of a Legend of Zelda-style screen. At the time, Super Famicom software was already being made in 8 or 12 megabytes, but they wanted us to make it in 4 megabytes.
By the way, who were your influences from the people you worked with at the time?
That would be Fujiwara-san from Whoopee Camp.
Is Fujiwara-san from Whoopee Camp your mentor, Mr. Mikami?
A demon teacher... he could be Satan (laughs)
It's not like I'm at a level of being unable to wrap my head around him, I still grovel to him. There's something about that guy that gives off a weird aura. He's not that big, doesn't appear to be that tough, and he never yells, but he's really scary. Even Hanamura-san of Famitsu (editor-in-chief) said he was scared too (laughs). Working with Fujiwara-san there was only one way to do things, never saying no, only "YES!" But I learned a lot from him, and in Fujiwaraism, I learned "you have to create freedom within constraints."
Did things like realism in your games become more and more important to you after you started this job? Such as if it's not real, you definitely don't want it to be, or...
No, I think it's just a coincidence, but I don't have that in my mind. Realism in Disney's films is only part of them, you know. But the next game I made after Goofy was "Aladdin", though if I were to have died at that time, my experience would've gone to waste. Also, not everyone has the curiosity to "see something scary." I think the people who enjoy playing BIO games are ones who can turn the scary parts of haunted houses, roller coasters, and horror movies into pleasant experiences. Of course, there are those who can't. In other words, there are people who fit and people who don't.
So there were many more people who fit than expected then.
That's right. And then the other thing I thought about was that horror games and horror movies wouldn't be popular during war. I think human beings need a certain amount of stimulation and stress in order to live, and there's more than enough stress in wartime, so horror games won't be popular. So, the more peaceful and less stimulating the world becomes, the more people seek out stimulation. In the world of music, classical music used to be stimulating enough in the past, but nowadays it's getting harder and harder, like rock music. On the other hand, if the overall stimulus is too strong, like in today's information-oriented society, people will prefer music this time around that's more healing, and it seems to me the trends of the world are somehow influenced by such things. And then, most horror comics for elementary school kids are geared towards girls, aren't they? I thought about all sorts of things, like how boys have more opportunities to play outside than girls, so they can vent, but girls tend to stay inside, so they naturally become interested in that kind of thing.
Some people say it's too scary for them to play it, but I think there's a surprisingly large number of female fans of BIO.
In case you're wondering, CAPCOM's surveys place the figure at around 15%. Normally, the average number of female users is 5-10%, so that's quite a big number. There are many reasons for this, such as the beautiful graphics and the storyline, but it's hard for "Dino Crisis" to attract female fans, even if it's a horror game. I guess they aren't interested in the "dinosaur" material and don't find it scary.
By the way, what was your reason for choosing to use Zombies instead of ghosts as the object of terror?
As a matter of fact, when we launched BIO, we hadn't decided to make it on the PlayStation yet. Well, we'd already decided to make it for one of the next generation consoles. What I considered was that usually when you think of horror, you think of psychic stuff, but I had my own definition of horror as "fear amplified in people's heads is true horror", and if you think of it in that way, I didn't think unpredictable psychic stuff would be the proper approach. But I knew if other companies were going to make a horror movie, they'd probably show ghosts, so I didn't want to make a horror movie with the same story. Furthermore, when I thought back to "The Exorcist" that I watched in elementary school, all I could remember was how bad the aftertaste was. That's fine for a movie, but for a game, there has to be something "exciting" about it. That's when inspiration came to me from the final scene in "Jaws." In a desperate scene on a tilted ship with a rifle, it has an oxygen cylinder in the middle of its mouth then explodes into hunks of meat at the end, I wanted to produce that exhilarating sensation of the previous scene's terror being blown to pieces, I wanted to create that perfect balance of tension and release within the game. And then another thing I did was think about what sort of places scare me in horror situations. After which I remembered the curiosity of going up to other people's houses when I was a kid. I came to the conclusion that everyone has an urge to look at different rooms, and at the same time, I considered it more likely to be elaborately decorated European architecture than standardized modern architecture. For example, if you think of a sword, whereas today's designs emphasize only functionality, in Europe they have a lot of unnecessary ornamentation. That kind of decoration's a sensibility only humans have. Even animals have a beauty of function, such as their bodies primed for hunting, or their claws and horns. I think even insects have a functional beauty in their very forms. But the concept of decoration's something that's exclusive to humans and part of our culture and playfulness, but in today's Japan, that kind of sensibility's rapidly being lost. With that in mind, I thought exploring European architecture was more interesting than exploring modern architecture, and that it had an atmosphere that could easily be matched with horror. So I said, "This is it!" Well then, if you think about what lurks there, it'd be strange to see bears and beasts that walk on four legs, and in the end, the terror that exists most comfortably in these places is "people", so we came up with the "Zombies."
I see, so that's why they were Zombies.
In my mind, it's like a Zombie's coming up to me and I'm thinking, "Woah, don't come near me," and I'd be in a frightened rush, thinking, "I'm running outta ammo," so I'll just load bullets in and "BANG", creating a flow trying to evade while taking a "breather", and that's how the image stuck with me. The mere fact that a Zombie's approaching increases the tension of fear. The player knows they're going to be bitten if they get too close and their instinct is to avoid creepy stuff, so we placed a lot of importance on that "pause."
That's the basis of the game.
Indeed. So when we started talking about how to put together the system, we had the problem of how to fill the gaps in the game, because you can't just go from area A to area B on the map and be constantly terrified, and you can't just go around fighting Zombies. At that point, we had a lot of different images for each scene. With a movie, you could probably digest it and figure it out, but with a game, you can't continue the story until you get to certain points. In the meantime, if I don't have anything to think about or something to do or play with, I get lazy. So it became a question of how to install hurdles besides fear. We tried making the whole map have purpose by adding puzzles and riddles into it, so you can feel afraid as you try to figure out what to do next.
That's how you built the sense of dread in BIO.
When you think of it as a package, it takes time because you have to find what's missing, then you have to work out what matches best and incorporate it into the game. We spent about six months working on that part of the game for BIO1.
Did you and the staff come up with that idea together?
No, I was the only one who thought about it at the beginning. When you're putting together a package, if there are too many opinions around you, you can lose sight of some things, so it's okay for one person to do the opposite.
What was the most difficult part of putting together the system?
Since our first priority was directing the flow of the game, it was difficult to decide what route players would take. Considering that some people would enter from this side and others from that side, we had to constrain them to some extent with events and say, "Let's start from the first floor!", those are some things we had to do (laughs).
That's the beginning of BIO1!
Yes, the player hears a gunshot that catches their attention, "Let's start from the first floor!" How uncool. We went stubbornly with a sticky approach, and even though I thought it wasn't smart, it was the only thing I could come up with, hahaha (laughs), and there aren't many parts of BIO1 that shock. There are only a few places. In terms of direction, there's really only a few bits, like the Zombie turning around or the Zombie Dog at the beginning, the sleeping Zombie in the storeroom that grabs by the legs, and then the closet banging open and the Zombie coming out. These are partly influenced by Hitchcock's "Psycho." That movie actually doesn't have that many shocking scenes either, just a few iconic scenes to give it some pause. I think that kind of horror technique is, as I mentioned at the beginning, true horror "amplified in the player's mind." A shocking scene's just a cue to inflate the overall horror. That's what I learned from Psycho. You don't actually need a lot of shocks.
You don't simply pack in elements of fear, you take them out. That's a very Japanese sensibility, isn't it? Did you favor such elements?
When I was working on BIO, I realized "creating is, in a sense, a whittling job." The people who understand this are ones who understand creating. The reason for subtractions is that the original image in our mind's very large, and our job's to express that image within the constraints of the game and the hardware. Accordingly, Disney films happen to be massive images to put inside a box, a game. I eventually ended up making three Disney games, then BIO was the next thing I did. In my opinion, I was Disney variety. I created BIO in reaction to that.
Where did you start with the BIOHAZARD project?
Fujiwara-san called me up and told me "Make a horror game." He also said "Let's make a game that takes advantage of the 'Sweet Home' system," then he said, "Let's make a game that's worth seeing." I thought a lot about the part about it being worth seeing. Only part of the Sweet Home system's in BIO, left in superficially with the limited number of items, but I was able to absorb its essence quite a bit. I don't think Sweet Home was a hit as a movie. Although the game didn't see the light of day, it was a masterpiece. It had a very good system, wonderful direction, and for a tie-in, it was a pretty good game.
Did you have the BIO scenario in mind from the beginning?
The scenario was an afterthought. There was no script that could be called a proper scenario. I think the only thing we had was a flowchart. Aside from that there were messages and comments about the flowchart in separate sections. When we first started talking about "making it", I wanted to make a haunted house. The concept was that you didn't need to go to an amusement park to enjoy the terror of a haunted house. You don't need a scenario for a haunted house. The game we were going to make, "BIOHAZARD", didn't need a scenario in the first place. I spent a lot of time explaining this to people in the upper echelons of the company, but every time I was called into the meeting room, they'd say, "When are you going to come up with the scenario and plot!" ... (laughs) I'm sure Fujiwara-san wouldn't have said that since he knows games so well.
It must've been hard to convince someone who didn't understand.
Every time, every time, I kept being asked "What's happening with the scenario?" Each time I kept arguing, "Does a haunted house have a scenario? It doesn't need one." In their mind, it was better to have a scenario. We decided to work on it while keeping the schedule in mind. But when you make a game, you have to decide on the introduction and the ending, so we decided on those at the beginning. In order to weave the rest of the story, I thought the scenario of a game called BIO1 should be interspersed with little events and small stories, and then arranged in such a way that no matter what order the players connected them, they could generate drama. That's a completely different way of thinking from how BIO2's scenario was made. In short, all BIO scenarios are based on the map. The player's path through the game on the map is what the scenario's all about. That's why we thought it'd be okay to add other storylines, relationships, and other dramatic elements to the game after the fact as a bonus. It would've been best to put that all together starting from the beginning, but we didn't have the luxury of time to do so. Rather, we took the concept of "scary" as one of our concepts, and there were many obstacles to overcome before players would recognize it, and that alone was a lot of work, so we didn't think it'd be possible to create a story or drama for that.
I see. So how'd you come up with the method of making the game progress with each door you open?
That was an idea from Sweet Home. At first I was aiming for a way to make it "really scary" to open doors in real-time, but BIO has enormous room-by-room data. The screen would go dark when loading, and while I was thinking "Hmmm," I remembered, "Oh yeah, what they did in Sweet Home!" That changes the tension, or rather the tempo, which in turn creates a sense of fear. If I hadn't seen Sweet Home myself, I wouldn't have noticed it. I'm so glad Sweet Home was around (laughs).
I heard from a psychologist that humans like to open doors and stuff to see if they can resolve their fears of the unknown...
In the end, it's a scary thing to see. When we were starting up this project, there were many times when we almost went into the kind of territory a psychologist would step into, but each time we turned back and said, "There's no need to go that far." In other words, as long as you're able to accurately grasp and analyze the events that'd scare the player if you did this, you can make a game like that. But as I continued doing it, I got to thinking about fundamental issues like, "Why do people want to see something scary?" And I came up with a hypothesis: Fear's a negative that threatens our very existence, and people want to affirm that. The idea's that by knowing this, we can develop countermeasures to avoid fear and danger. You have to extract only the essence, scrape out only what you find interesting, then relay that to the user. For example, rather than an all-5 report card, if there's even one 5 among all 2s and 3s, it'll shine. If you have the ability to get an all-5, it's more interesting to have one rated as a 10, even if it means lowering the other grades. The starting point of our work's that if we don't think it's interesting, we don't make it. It's a matter of how many people like it or think it's interesting. I think all-5s in the Japanese education system are too small and compact to make something interesting. I once had a conversation with the person who makes the Goldfinch commercials, and we got to talking, "What's your stance on creating things?", and he said, "I don't aim at the general public. I take the stance like I'm talking to one or two people." I think that's fine since creating things starts out with an individual ego. It's the same with movies, games, and magazines. A lot of young creators these days often go in with a point deduction system. I think it's difficult to make something interesting if you start from the point of view of "this isn't working", you'll be in trouble if you do that, I've heard of users complaining about doing this. Nowadays it's the opposite, with producers saying "Get that outta here!" or "This is no good!" So you could just sharpen it at the beginning then scrape it off later, but no one will look at it because you tried coiling it at the start.
Can your young staff understand that kind of talk?
I've often plainly said I wanted to make an "alcoholic beverage" that'd be easy to understand. In other words, I want to make a game that's not as stimulating as oolong tea or juice or any of the other soft drinks the general public enjoys, but which has that sizzle, the "phew, I live for this" feeling you get when you drink a well-chilled beer. It may not win many people's hearts, but I wanted to make a game that'd consistently win the hearts of the "hardcore", it's boring without them. I like strong styles. That's why I was talking about ebb and flow as well, I wanted to make it more in a fashion of developing its strengths rather than hiding its weaknesses.
There were silent rooms in BIO1, weren't there? But why didn't you have them in BIO2 and later?
When we were working on BIO1, I talked to the staff in a bar and we agreed the parts without notes were music too. If we can understand this concept, then we can understand how to create BIO music. We wanted to create a game that uses sound to sway the player's emotions and invoke a sense of fear, but we didn't want to create a distinction between background music and sound effects.
By the way, who came up with the title "BIOHAZARD"?
The title was the idea of a scrolling staff member who drew the backgrounds.
Did it ring a bell right away?
No, to be honest, it didn't ring a bell. There were a hundred or two titles in the dictionary, but as I was narrowing it down, the words "bio" and "hazard" didn't appear in the dictionary as a single word, even though they have different meanings. That's how I finally discovered the word "biohazard", in a technical book. That was the extent of my understanding at the time. I thought the title was perfect for the story, but I got the impression it'd be difficult to understand as a horror movie. I liked the titles "Stagecoach" or "Psycho" or something short and evocative, but in the end I decided to go with "BIOHAZARD" since it fit the story well.
One of the most memorable scenes in BIO1 was when you played Beethoven's "Moonlight" on the piano. Were you the one who chose that song? I like the sense of bringing "moonlight" in there...
You're right. I'm glad to hear that. I like classical music, especially Horowitz's Moonlight. It's a raunchy recording.
I don't want to talk about it too much, but the story behind the live-action video for the opening of BIO1...
That was shot on the bank of the Tama River (laughs). At the start, Jill looks like she's just seen something scary, but she was a 17-year-old high school student at the time, in other words just a kid. So she was running around in the middle of the night on the bank of the Tama River, getting bitten by insects, and she had that expression on her face that said, "I hate this, I just wanna go home." It was my mistake choosing models based on the images I had in mind, and since I'd chosen the models within a short timeframe and small budget, I regret that, and I should've chosen them based a little more on acting ability.
Now, I'd like to ask you to summarize the story from BIO2 to Veronica and give us your opinion as the general producer...
The first thing I'd like to reflect on is that the essence of BIO1 hasn't grown. That's concerning the quality of "fear," though. Since players are starting to feel passionate about the games, the level of "fear" needs to develop, but frankly speaking, it seems to be on the decline. If BIO1 was a vivacious young woman, by the time you've got to 3, she's an old lady. I feel like they've become dissimilar. Well, 2 was the cue for the deviation. In the company's desire to sell two million copies of this software, there were things they had to give up or change in order to make a game that'd be popular with the general public, and the director, Kamiya, wasn't interested in horror, and I feel like these two things are factors that've changed the nature of BIO. Basically, I'm a creator, and I don't know if I can bring 100% of my effort up to 120% for something I'm not interested in. I think the limit to me performing with a sense of duty is about 80%. We sold two million copies of BIO2 thanks to the players who told us they liked BIO1 in the first place, but I think BIO2 probably disappointed some of those people. The title "BIOHAZARD 1.9" was our attempt to go back to the original concept of BIO1 and make a game that'd really satisfy those who liked it, but with an indie twist. But three months before the game's release, we changed the title to "BIOHAZARD 3" and ended up with a version of the game that was neither here or there. So we were like, "we'll be fine with half a million copies! We'll be able to eat, we'll be in the black, we should be able to make a living." Games are a catch-all between creators and players. If you compare a movie to a phone conversation, games have the level of depth of face-to-face conversation. That's why there are players who'll say, "BIO's still interesting. This is what we're looking for," I want to retain the segment of the market who say that. I want to retain the people who really understand what BIO's all about. The BIO games that lose sight of that are, in a sense, being driven by the logic of numbers, and although we're entertainers, if we lose sight of the creator aspect, it's easy to fall into a salaryman tic... I don't like that. The hardest thing for me is to lose sight of the meaning of my existence. The most frustrating part of making something is when people say it doesn't matter whether my work's on the market or not. I think the starting point for most people is a desire for self-expression, or a desire to validate their own existence and test their abilities. I think most people have a complex, and that becomes a libido, which manifests itself in the form of creating. I think that's what creating's all about - a pure expression of an individual's dissatisfaction with society, stress, rebelliousness, or a desire to express their own visions.
Please tell us about "CODE:Veronica".
With FLAGSHIP taking over the scenario since BIO2, there's considerably more drama overall. Instead of laying the rails within the game, the rails are laid in the scenario, so that sort of variety became stronger too. Veronica in particular has a lot of that variety, we had the scenario first then laid out the map based on it. We appointed our ace director, Kato-kun, and completed a detailed scenario with Sugimura-san from FLAGSHIP. That's why its content's so rich. I think the game maintains the standard nature of the first game. In the purest sense of the word, Veronica is BIO2 in my opinion. That's also what director Kato himself said in "Wesker's Report" released alongside the Complete Version.
Finally, can you talk a little bit about "BIOHAZARD 4" that's on everyone's mind?
...With BIO4 we're thinking about a full model change, so please stay tuned.
BIOHAZARD General Producer
Shinji Mikami's BIOHAZARD World
Mikami-san, you're one of CAPCOM's dyed-in-the-wool employees, aren't you?
Hahaha, "dyed-in-the-wool" sounds good, but ultimately I worked my way up.
What kind of games did you do before you made BIOHAZARD?
Before BIO, I made about 4-5 games. When I joined the company, the first thing they made me do was Game Boy software. My debut game was a black-and-white Game Boy quiz game called "Hatena? no Daibouken." My superiors told me "make it in a month", but I think it took me about three months.
That's preposterous.
When I joined the company, they told me the production period for NES software generally took about six to eight months. Then when I asked my boss at the time, "Could it be done in a month?" he paused and replied, "Sure, you're up to the task aren't you?"... They set me up (laughs).
Still though, three months is a short time.
It was a "What's one meg?" kind of era. But we actually finished the game in two months. In fact, it was billed as "CAPCOM's first online competitive game", so it took a long time to check over and we had to delay the release by another month. That was torture though. We were on the verge of cancelling development.
What about the second game?
The second game was called "Roger Rabbit." A video game adaptation of the Disney movie. It was an action-adventure game, also in black and white, for the Game Boy. And then this one was only sold overseas and was terribly tread on internally. My boss said to me, "After that quiz game, your next games won't sell in Japan." I did it all myself, from the scenario to everything, in five months, but in the middle of the game, five staff members working on the game got pulled out by another department, two for the characters and one for the backgrounds. With the background staff taken away, in the end, the character staff had to work on the backgrounds for the first time. Nevertheless I had to do both jobs, so I was very overwhelmed and even had to use my personal computer to steadily itemize the background block data and the cellular data. By then I'd already faced awfully bad experiences.
Was it well received internally?
Yes. I think I finally got a little bit of recognition afterwards. At the time, CAPCOM was sponsoring F3 and they wanted to do a Formula One racing game next. This time it was on the Super Nintendo. I loved racing so much, so I was like, "Hooray!" but after about eight months, development was discontinued. Well, that was my mistake. I was too picky about what I wanted to do with it, "It's not my idea of F1 unless it's of this quality and expression," and although the programmers were forced to do everything, I put a lot of pressure on them. Whenever the staff would say, "We can't do this any more," I'd say, "Well, we'd better drop it then," or something like that, and then it really was dropped (laughs).
Had the technology at that point not caught up with you in the end?
Well, there was that, but the game was still in its infancy and there were certain parts of it we just couldn't compromise on. Those parts didn't go well so we had to cease development, which I was forced to pay for. I was given a game called "Pumping World", and issued the job of porting the arcade game "Super Pan" in three months. If we didn't make it in three months, we wouldn't be able to recoup the money from the F1 game, so it being done in three months was imperative.
What happened after you paid the bill for ceasing development?
It was another Disney production, this time with Goofy the dog as the main character. That was about ten and a half months later, I think. It was also an action-adventure game, with a bit of a Legend of Zelda-style screen. At the time, Super Famicom software was already being made in 8 or 12 megabytes, but they wanted us to make it in 4 megabytes.
By the way, who were your influences from the people you worked with at the time?
That would be Fujiwara-san from Whoopee Camp.
Is Fujiwara-san from Whoopee Camp your mentor, Mr. Mikami?
A demon teacher... he could be Satan (laughs)
It's not like I'm at a level of being unable to wrap my head around him, I still grovel to him. There's something about that guy that gives off a weird aura. He's not that big, doesn't appear to be that tough, and he never yells, but he's really scary. Even Hanamura-san of Famitsu (editor-in-chief) said he was scared too (laughs). Working with Fujiwara-san there was only one way to do things, never saying no, only "YES!" But I learned a lot from him, and in Fujiwaraism, I learned "you have to create freedom within constraints."
Did things like realism in your games become more and more important to you after you started this job? Such as if it's not real, you definitely don't want it to be, or...
No, I think it's just a coincidence, but I don't have that in my mind. Realism in Disney's films is only part of them, you know. But the next game I made after Goofy was "Aladdin", though if I were to have died at that time, my experience would've gone to waste. Also, not everyone has the curiosity to "see something scary." I think the people who enjoy playing BIO games are ones who can turn the scary parts of haunted houses, roller coasters, and horror movies into pleasant experiences. Of course, there are those who can't. In other words, there are people who fit and people who don't.
So there were many more people who fit than expected then.
That's right. And then the other thing I thought about was that horror games and horror movies wouldn't be popular during war. I think human beings need a certain amount of stimulation and stress in order to live, and there's more than enough stress in wartime, so horror games won't be popular. So, the more peaceful and less stimulating the world becomes, the more people seek out stimulation. In the world of music, classical music used to be stimulating enough in the past, but nowadays it's getting harder and harder, like rock music. On the other hand, if the overall stimulus is too strong, like in today's information-oriented society, people will prefer music this time around that's more healing, and it seems to me the trends of the world are somehow influenced by such things. And then, most horror comics for elementary school kids are geared towards girls, aren't they? I thought about all sorts of things, like how boys have more opportunities to play outside than girls, so they can vent, but girls tend to stay inside, so they naturally become interested in that kind of thing.
Some people say it's too scary for them to play it, but I think there's a surprisingly large number of female fans of BIO.
In case you're wondering, CAPCOM's surveys place the figure at around 15%. Normally, the average number of female users is 5-10%, so that's quite a big number. There are many reasons for this, such as the beautiful graphics and the storyline, but it's hard for "Dino Crisis" to attract female fans, even if it's a horror game. I guess they aren't interested in the "dinosaur" material and don't find it scary.
By the way, what was your reason for choosing to use Zombies instead of ghosts as the object of terror?
As a matter of fact, when we launched BIO, we hadn't decided to make it on the PlayStation yet. Well, we'd already decided to make it for one of the next generation consoles. What I considered was that usually when you think of horror, you think of psychic stuff, but I had my own definition of horror as "fear amplified in people's heads is true horror", and if you think of it in that way, I didn't think unpredictable psychic stuff would be the proper approach. But I knew if other companies were going to make a horror movie, they'd probably show ghosts, so I didn't want to make a horror movie with the same story. Furthermore, when I thought back to "The Exorcist" that I watched in elementary school, all I could remember was how bad the aftertaste was. That's fine for a movie, but for a game, there has to be something "exciting" about it. That's when inspiration came to me from the final scene in "Jaws." In a desperate scene on a tilted ship with a rifle, it has an oxygen cylinder in the middle of its mouth then explodes into hunks of meat at the end, I wanted to produce that exhilarating sensation of the previous scene's terror being blown to pieces, I wanted to create that perfect balance of tension and release within the game. And then another thing I did was think about what sort of places scare me in horror situations. After which I remembered the curiosity of going up to other people's houses when I was a kid. I came to the conclusion that everyone has an urge to look at different rooms, and at the same time, I considered it more likely to be elaborately decorated European architecture than standardized modern architecture. For example, if you think of a sword, whereas today's designs emphasize only functionality, in Europe they have a lot of unnecessary ornamentation. That kind of decoration's a sensibility only humans have. Even animals have a beauty of function, such as their bodies primed for hunting, or their claws and horns. I think even insects have a functional beauty in their very forms. But the concept of decoration's something that's exclusive to humans and part of our culture and playfulness, but in today's Japan, that kind of sensibility's rapidly being lost. With that in mind, I thought exploring European architecture was more interesting than exploring modern architecture, and that it had an atmosphere that could easily be matched with horror. So I said, "This is it!" Well then, if you think about what lurks there, it'd be strange to see bears and beasts that walk on four legs, and in the end, the terror that exists most comfortably in these places is "people", so we came up with the "Zombies."
I see, so that's why they were Zombies.
In my mind, it's like a Zombie's coming up to me and I'm thinking, "Woah, don't come near me," and I'd be in a frightened rush, thinking, "I'm running outta ammo," so I'll just load bullets in and "BANG", creating a flow trying to evade while taking a "breather", and that's how the image stuck with me. The mere fact that a Zombie's approaching increases the tension of fear. The player knows they're going to be bitten if they get too close and their instinct is to avoid creepy stuff, so we placed a lot of importance on that "pause."
That's the basis of the game.
Indeed. So when we started talking about how to put together the system, we had the problem of how to fill the gaps in the game, because you can't just go from area A to area B on the map and be constantly terrified, and you can't just go around fighting Zombies. At that point, we had a lot of different images for each scene. With a movie, you could probably digest it and figure it out, but with a game, you can't continue the story until you get to certain points. In the meantime, if I don't have anything to think about or something to do or play with, I get lazy. So it became a question of how to install hurdles besides fear. We tried making the whole map have purpose by adding puzzles and riddles into it, so you can feel afraid as you try to figure out what to do next.
That's how you built the sense of dread in BIO.
When you think of it as a package, it takes time because you have to find what's missing, then you have to work out what matches best and incorporate it into the game. We spent about six months working on that part of the game for BIO1.
Did you and the staff come up with that idea together?
No, I was the only one who thought about it at the beginning. When you're putting together a package, if there are too many opinions around you, you can lose sight of some things, so it's okay for one person to do the opposite.
What was the most difficult part of putting together the system?
Since our first priority was directing the flow of the game, it was difficult to decide what route players would take. Considering that some people would enter from this side and others from that side, we had to constrain them to some extent with events and say, "Let's start from the first floor!", those are some things we had to do (laughs).
That's the beginning of BIO1!
Yes, the player hears a gunshot that catches their attention, "Let's start from the first floor!" How uncool. We went stubbornly with a sticky approach, and even though I thought it wasn't smart, it was the only thing I could come up with, hahaha (laughs), and there aren't many parts of BIO1 that shock. There are only a few places. In terms of direction, there's really only a few bits, like the Zombie turning around or the Zombie Dog at the beginning, the sleeping Zombie in the storeroom that grabs by the legs, and then the closet banging open and the Zombie coming out. These are partly influenced by Hitchcock's "Psycho." That movie actually doesn't have that many shocking scenes either, just a few iconic scenes to give it some pause. I think that kind of horror technique is, as I mentioned at the beginning, true horror "amplified in the player's mind." A shocking scene's just a cue to inflate the overall horror. That's what I learned from Psycho. You don't actually need a lot of shocks.
You don't simply pack in elements of fear, you take them out. That's a very Japanese sensibility, isn't it? Did you favor such elements?
When I was working on BIO, I realized "creating is, in a sense, a whittling job." The people who understand this are ones who understand creating. The reason for subtractions is that the original image in our mind's very large, and our job's to express that image within the constraints of the game and the hardware. Accordingly, Disney films happen to be massive images to put inside a box, a game. I eventually ended up making three Disney games, then BIO was the next thing I did. In my opinion, I was Disney variety. I created BIO in reaction to that.
Where did you start with the BIOHAZARD project?
Fujiwara-san called me up and told me "Make a horror game." He also said "Let's make a game that takes advantage of the 'Sweet Home' system," then he said, "Let's make a game that's worth seeing." I thought a lot about the part about it being worth seeing. Only part of the Sweet Home system's in BIO, left in superficially with the limited number of items, but I was able to absorb its essence quite a bit. I don't think Sweet Home was a hit as a movie. Although the game didn't see the light of day, it was a masterpiece. It had a very good system, wonderful direction, and for a tie-in, it was a pretty good game.
Did you have the BIO scenario in mind from the beginning?
The scenario was an afterthought. There was no script that could be called a proper scenario. I think the only thing we had was a flowchart. Aside from that there were messages and comments about the flowchart in separate sections. When we first started talking about "making it", I wanted to make a haunted house. The concept was that you didn't need to go to an amusement park to enjoy the terror of a haunted house. You don't need a scenario for a haunted house. The game we were going to make, "BIOHAZARD", didn't need a scenario in the first place. I spent a lot of time explaining this to people in the upper echelons of the company, but every time I was called into the meeting room, they'd say, "When are you going to come up with the scenario and plot!" ... (laughs) I'm sure Fujiwara-san wouldn't have said that since he knows games so well.
It must've been hard to convince someone who didn't understand.
Every time, every time, I kept being asked "What's happening with the scenario?" Each time I kept arguing, "Does a haunted house have a scenario? It doesn't need one." In their mind, it was better to have a scenario. We decided to work on it while keeping the schedule in mind. But when you make a game, you have to decide on the introduction and the ending, so we decided on those at the beginning. In order to weave the rest of the story, I thought the scenario of a game called BIO1 should be interspersed with little events and small stories, and then arranged in such a way that no matter what order the players connected them, they could generate drama. That's a completely different way of thinking from how BIO2's scenario was made. In short, all BIO scenarios are based on the map. The player's path through the game on the map is what the scenario's all about. That's why we thought it'd be okay to add other storylines, relationships, and other dramatic elements to the game after the fact as a bonus. It would've been best to put that all together starting from the beginning, but we didn't have the luxury of time to do so. Rather, we took the concept of "scary" as one of our concepts, and there were many obstacles to overcome before players would recognize it, and that alone was a lot of work, so we didn't think it'd be possible to create a story or drama for that.
I see. So how'd you come up with the method of making the game progress with each door you open?
That was an idea from Sweet Home. At first I was aiming for a way to make it "really scary" to open doors in real-time, but BIO has enormous room-by-room data. The screen would go dark when loading, and while I was thinking "Hmmm," I remembered, "Oh yeah, what they did in Sweet Home!" That changes the tension, or rather the tempo, which in turn creates a sense of fear. If I hadn't seen Sweet Home myself, I wouldn't have noticed it. I'm so glad Sweet Home was around (laughs).
I heard from a psychologist that humans like to open doors and stuff to see if they can resolve their fears of the unknown...
In the end, it's a scary thing to see. When we were starting up this project, there were many times when we almost went into the kind of territory a psychologist would step into, but each time we turned back and said, "There's no need to go that far." In other words, as long as you're able to accurately grasp and analyze the events that'd scare the player if you did this, you can make a game like that. But as I continued doing it, I got to thinking about fundamental issues like, "Why do people want to see something scary?" And I came up with a hypothesis: Fear's a negative that threatens our very existence, and people want to affirm that. The idea's that by knowing this, we can develop countermeasures to avoid fear and danger. You have to extract only the essence, scrape out only what you find interesting, then relay that to the user. For example, rather than an all-5 report card, if there's even one 5 among all 2s and 3s, it'll shine. If you have the ability to get an all-5, it's more interesting to have one rated as a 10, even if it means lowering the other grades. The starting point of our work's that if we don't think it's interesting, we don't make it. It's a matter of how many people like it or think it's interesting. I think all-5s in the Japanese education system are too small and compact to make something interesting. I once had a conversation with the person who makes the Goldfinch commercials, and we got to talking, "What's your stance on creating things?", and he said, "I don't aim at the general public. I take the stance like I'm talking to one or two people." I think that's fine since creating things starts out with an individual ego. It's the same with movies, games, and magazines. A lot of young creators these days often go in with a point deduction system. I think it's difficult to make something interesting if you start from the point of view of "this isn't working", you'll be in trouble if you do that, I've heard of users complaining about doing this. Nowadays it's the opposite, with producers saying "Get that outta here!" or "This is no good!" So you could just sharpen it at the beginning then scrape it off later, but no one will look at it because you tried coiling it at the start.
Can your young staff understand that kind of talk?
I've often plainly said I wanted to make an "alcoholic beverage" that'd be easy to understand. In other words, I want to make a game that's not as stimulating as oolong tea or juice or any of the other soft drinks the general public enjoys, but which has that sizzle, the "phew, I live for this" feeling you get when you drink a well-chilled beer. It may not win many people's hearts, but I wanted to make a game that'd consistently win the hearts of the "hardcore", it's boring without them. I like strong styles. That's why I was talking about ebb and flow as well, I wanted to make it more in a fashion of developing its strengths rather than hiding its weaknesses.
There were silent rooms in BIO1, weren't there? But why didn't you have them in BIO2 and later?
When we were working on BIO1, I talked to the staff in a bar and we agreed the parts without notes were music too. If we can understand this concept, then we can understand how to create BIO music. We wanted to create a game that uses sound to sway the player's emotions and invoke a sense of fear, but we didn't want to create a distinction between background music and sound effects.
By the way, who came up with the title "BIOHAZARD"?
The title was the idea of a scrolling staff member who drew the backgrounds.
Did it ring a bell right away?
No, to be honest, it didn't ring a bell. There were a hundred or two titles in the dictionary, but as I was narrowing it down, the words "bio" and "hazard" didn't appear in the dictionary as a single word, even though they have different meanings. That's how I finally discovered the word "biohazard", in a technical book. That was the extent of my understanding at the time. I thought the title was perfect for the story, but I got the impression it'd be difficult to understand as a horror movie. I liked the titles "Stagecoach" or "Psycho" or something short and evocative, but in the end I decided to go with "BIOHAZARD" since it fit the story well.
One of the most memorable scenes in BIO1 was when you played Beethoven's "Moonlight" on the piano. Were you the one who chose that song? I like the sense of bringing "moonlight" in there...
You're right. I'm glad to hear that. I like classical music, especially Horowitz's Moonlight. It's a raunchy recording.
I don't want to talk about it too much, but the story behind the live-action video for the opening of BIO1...
That was shot on the bank of the Tama River (laughs). At the start, Jill looks like she's just seen something scary, but she was a 17-year-old high school student at the time, in other words just a kid. So she was running around in the middle of the night on the bank of the Tama River, getting bitten by insects, and she had that expression on her face that said, "I hate this, I just wanna go home." It was my mistake choosing models based on the images I had in mind, and since I'd chosen the models within a short timeframe and small budget, I regret that, and I should've chosen them based a little more on acting ability.
Now, I'd like to ask you to summarize the story from BIO2 to Veronica and give us your opinion as the general producer...
The first thing I'd like to reflect on is that the essence of BIO1 hasn't grown. That's concerning the quality of "fear," though. Since players are starting to feel passionate about the games, the level of "fear" needs to develop, but frankly speaking, it seems to be on the decline. If BIO1 was a vivacious young woman, by the time you've got to 3, she's an old lady. I feel like they've become dissimilar. Well, 2 was the cue for the deviation. In the company's desire to sell two million copies of this software, there were things they had to give up or change in order to make a game that'd be popular with the general public, and the director, Kamiya, wasn't interested in horror, and I feel like these two things are factors that've changed the nature of BIO. Basically, I'm a creator, and I don't know if I can bring 100% of my effort up to 120% for something I'm not interested in. I think the limit to me performing with a sense of duty is about 80%. We sold two million copies of BIO2 thanks to the players who told us they liked BIO1 in the first place, but I think BIO2 probably disappointed some of those people. The title "BIOHAZARD 1.9" was our attempt to go back to the original concept of BIO1 and make a game that'd really satisfy those who liked it, but with an indie twist. But three months before the game's release, we changed the title to "BIOHAZARD 3" and ended up with a version of the game that was neither here or there. So we were like, "we'll be fine with half a million copies! We'll be able to eat, we'll be in the black, we should be able to make a living." Games are a catch-all between creators and players. If you compare a movie to a phone conversation, games have the level of depth of face-to-face conversation. That's why there are players who'll say, "BIO's still interesting. This is what we're looking for," I want to retain the segment of the market who say that. I want to retain the people who really understand what BIO's all about. The BIO games that lose sight of that are, in a sense, being driven by the logic of numbers, and although we're entertainers, if we lose sight of the creator aspect, it's easy to fall into a salaryman tic... I don't like that. The hardest thing for me is to lose sight of the meaning of my existence. The most frustrating part of making something is when people say it doesn't matter whether my work's on the market or not. I think the starting point for most people is a desire for self-expression, or a desire to validate their own existence and test their abilities. I think most people have a complex, and that becomes a libido, which manifests itself in the form of creating. I think that's what creating's all about - a pure expression of an individual's dissatisfaction with society, stress, rebelliousness, or a desire to express their own visions.
Please tell us about "CODE:Veronica".
With FLAGSHIP taking over the scenario since BIO2, there's considerably more drama overall. Instead of laying the rails within the game, the rails are laid in the scenario, so that sort of variety became stronger too. Veronica in particular has a lot of that variety, we had the scenario first then laid out the map based on it. We appointed our ace director, Kato-kun, and completed a detailed scenario with Sugimura-san from FLAGSHIP. That's why its content's so rich. I think the game maintains the standard nature of the first game. In the purest sense of the word, Veronica is BIO2 in my opinion. That's also what director Kato himself said in "Wesker's Report" released alongside the Complete Version.
Finally, can you talk a little bit about "BIOHAZARD 4" that's on everyone's mind?
...With BIO4 we're thinking about a full model change, so please stay tuned.