WHAT THE HELL IS A COMEBACK TOUR
There’s one sound that can get me every time. Something that every time I hear it, my brain immediately does the hyper-speed jump into the past. I find myself cross legged on a maroon carpet, sun pouring through the windows. I’m a kid, I give a shit about exactly two things: when the weekend ends and how to beat Sigma in Megaman X3.
It’s a memory that I’m slightly protective over. Mostly because we were poor, couldn’t really afford an SNES so we had to rent one, and because the moment I learned I love video games was right after I heard that sound the first time.
CAPCOM was founded in Osaka, Japan, in 1979. They’ve made some of the games making up the body of works I reference constantly. From Resident Evil to Megaman and Street Fighter. I don’t need to get all historian here, but some of the best talent in the game industry started at CAPCOM or still works there today.
What the hell does that matter though? They’re still a giant company and not a person. CAPCOM isn’t responsible for shit, because CAPCOM isn’t a single developer. People that produce things? All they have to do is not fuck up and say no to something great, which should be the easiest job in the fucking world to not cock-up.
It’s 2019 and we know more about game development than we ever have before. If I was a kid who wanted to make videogames professionally and you told me about the notoriously long hours, crunch time – the time spent away from family, I’d say hell no because I’m of low character and have a website to run. Why am I bringing this up?
CAPCOM is having a bit of a comeback tour right now. Resident Evil 2 came out in February. It’s a remake of the original Resident Evil 2 and it blew everyone away by capturing the most interesting aspects of survival horror and refusing to update them for modern audiences. Devil May Cry 5 came out just a bit ago and some people – maybe including me, are calling it the best action game released in recent memory.
Resident Evil 2 and Devil May Cry 5 could not have been easy games to make. One of them was in development for five years, maybe longer. Devil May Cry 5 probably went through dozens of different iterations too – it is so packed with capital C content that entire weapons had to be condensed because there just wasn’t enough time or room left.
What was it like to make those games? If there are articles about Red Dead Redemption 2’s meticulous fantasy Wild West and the hundreds of hours required to make it, where are they about how long and hard it was to make everyone so absolutely hot in Devil May Cry 5? I don’t know – I haven’t seen them.
Part of the lack of questions about these recent Japanese AAA games probably has a lot to do with how much separation there still is between media in japan and media we consume over here. There are more important developers from Japan on twitter openly being vocal now than there were a decade, but you can probably find every staff member at Bethesda on a corporate approved twitter account. If there’s a problem somewhere, someone will have a mental breakdown and tweet about it.
It’s profoundly interesting that the labor conversation didn’t really trend towards Japanese games – of which stories about labor mismanagement are rife, until a more recent developer had positive words to say about needing an IV drip to continue making the new Super Smash Brothers.
This is fun. It’s okay. A few years ago, a producer and director who worked for CAPCOM collapsed at an event, and even went on record to say that upper management had nothing to say about it.
Shinji Mikami left because he felt like opportunities didn’t even exist for young workers in game development in his home country anymore. These are old inquiries, but it may be time to start looking into them again, and examining what a comeback tour for a developer really should look like.
There are other reasons these questions maybe aren’t being asked like they are with other companies. People love CAPCOM like they love non-racist uncles. It’s important to understand where that love comes from and how it affects how a giant corporation is received.
CAPCOM isn’t Bethesda or Rockstar or anyone else. They’re not just anybody, because they still have the veil of mysticism and occult that game developers used to rely on. CAPCOM helped put industry giants like Keiji Inafune, Shinji Mikami and Hideki Kamiya on the international stage in the first place. They created conventions and defined entire genres – and they faltered enough that people considered the company to almost have mythic arc of its own.
Let’s take a trip back to a span of time where CAPCOM got inventive and tried new things, and let old brands falter. That’s important, because we all know people love brands. They want them around, and we all know that giant game developers only exist to serve us those sweet familiar brands. This was in 2009, 2010 – really up until sometime in the twen-teens.
What was CAPCOM doing in 2009? Not a lot – they were riding out Street Fighter IV and porting everything they made to as many different console as they could. It’s the year of Dead Rising: Chop Till You Drop. It’s also when Resident Evil 5 came out, which we all loved (but not as much as its older brother.)
2010 and 2011? Marvel Vs. Capcom 3 which people lived with, Lost Planet 2 which people we’re upset wasn’t tied to one of the older, stronger CAPCOM franchises. Megaman Legends 3 got canceled. E.X. Troopers didn’t get a western release (which i’m still mad about). The years ticked by and there were ports, HD re-releases, remasters, compilations. Breath of Fire 6 was a cell-phone game.
It looked like CAPCOM was making all of the bad decisions everyone else was. They weren’t the hallowed gamedev of yester year, and they were still reeling from all of the talent they lost in the early 2000’s. If this reads like a eulogy, it’s not supposed to.
That feeling of watching something you’ve grown to love and respect is important though. It tells us a lot about why a company can have a comeback tour. Just from going over the few years above, it’s pretty clear that the key is having brands that an audience builds a relationship for. I’ve never been on a date, but I have cleared Dante Must Die mode in several games.
Here we are though, it’s 2019 and we’re getting everything we love again. These are all brands and franchises though, made to get us to look at the company itself like it’s some benevolent ruler capable of delivering upon the masses the art they crave.
They’re not, and I’m left wondering who had to live in an office building for six months to make sure Dante’s stubble looked right.
It’s in Osaka. Someone needs to push Kotaku’s Brian Ashcraft to do a piece on Capcom. The Street Fighter V mess that CAPCOM calls a revenue model is one sign that things are probably not going well for their workers.
When things are bad, first you increase the exploitation of your workers, when that is not enough you increase the exploitation of your consumers. We’re already at step 2, like, they were putting ads as character costumes.
We wonder if publishers intentionally keep conversations between western media and themselves specifically to press tours for new games and the like so obscured, so as to keep employees from contacting western media.