Inside Japan, though, most developers are the publishers of their games. Large game companies such as Capcom, Konami, NamcoBandai, SquareEnix and SegaSammy are made up of divisions which work on various projects simultaneously but are ultimately part of the same unified company that will publish its teams' output here without imposing creative restrictions.
Smaller Japanese developers, meanwhile, often have very strong relationships with their publishing partners. Treasure, for example, has developed a partnership with ESP Software which is now more than fifteen years old. Psikyo, too, has been working with Capcom for many years. But in both cases (and others), these small outfits have also been able to self-release many titles in the Japanese market.
For the most part, excepting the obvious repetitive demands of sports franchises, Japanese companies tend to encourage experimentation and innovation from their game planners. And so the market supports the development of oddities -- homoerotic shoot 'em ups (Choaniki), cooking sims (Ore no Ryouri), legal games (Phoenix Wright) and anomalous games (Electroplankton). It also supports masterpieces that would never have been developed without considerable creative liberty -- Animal Forest, PaRappa the Rapper, Katamari Damacy, Rez.
Who are the Japanese team leaders with the inspiration, then? The leading lights of Japan's game industry fall into two camps: the old school and the new wave. Of course, the name that everyone associates with genius in game design (and the person Sir Paul McCartney so wanted to meet because of his apparent genius) continues to work his magic more than twenty years on from his first successes.
Shigeru Miyamoto
But then, even apart from Shigeru Miyamoto, Nintendo is rich with innovators. Its second-party developers, which operate as satellites of NCL, also house creative luminaries. People like Shigesato Itoi, the mastermind behind Nintendo's Mother (aka Earthbound) series of RPGs -- the man whom former NCL President Hiroshi Yamauchi openly described as "a genius."
Other members of the old-school fraternity -- Konami's Hideo Kojima, Game Boy creator Gunpei Yokoi (sadly deceased), WARP boss Kenji Eno, Sega's Yu Suzuki and Toshihiro Nagoshi, and ex-Sega staff such as Yuji Naka and Tetsuya Mizuguchi -- can also be termed as "innovators," perhaps even "geniuses." Of these game creators, however, only Kojima-san, Nagoshi-san and Mizuguchi-san remain as active as they were ten years ago.
But the new wave is already here. There is plenty of design talent working in Japan today. Atsushi Inaba, taking the lead at Capcom's Clover Studio, has Viewtiful Joe and Okami on his CV. Over at Sony Japan (SCEI), Fumito Ueda has built on his initial experience as a member of Kenji Eno's WARP team to produce Ico and Shadow of the Colossus. Keita Takahashi at Namco, too, has made a great start in his role as game planner with the Katamari Damacy series.
And then there is Toshio Iwai, the multimedia artist responsible for the inspired DS oddity Electroplankton and (way back when) the Famicom classic Otocky, which was the first shoot 'em up to let sound impact gameplay -- a 20-year-old version of Rez. If being innovative is about thinking up the unthought of, Iwai-san is a good model of what Japanese thinkers are capable of. I'll leave you with a link to his latest project and the notion that the future for Japanese game development is very bright indeed.
