What do you do when legendary game designer Hideo Kojima stops by to make sure your project is going as planned? If you’re the Castlevania: Lords of Shadow team, apparently you evacuate your bowels.
Dave Cox isn’t a low man on the totem pole: He’s the one entrusted with producing Lords of Shadow, the upcoming reboot in Konami’s classic Castlevania series. But even he feels the pressure to deliver when the boss comes to town. With the Kojima Productions name attached to the project, Cox told VideoGamer at GamesCom, there is an understanding that the name brings with it an expectation of high quality.
So while Kojima offers advice for the development team as Cox’s immediate superior, he largely leaves Madrid-based developer MercurySteam to its own devices – and they certainly feel the pressure (there’s a pun in there somewhere about pressure and steam, but I digress). And when the big boss is in town to check up on how the game is going, that pressure only gets worse:
…we’re shitting ourselves! You got to make sure that the quality of what you deliver is very very high. You’re constantly saying to yourself, is that really good enough? Is that really going to be good enough? … It’s funny, because sometimes you think, no, he’s not going to like that and he loves it, and then other times you think, check this out, it’s amazing, and he’ll go, hmm don’t know. It’s shit. So it’s swings and roundabouts.
It’s an interesting idea to think about how big names in the business can be so intimidating. Obviously, having the Metal Gear creator backing you up is a blessing in its own right, but it means that you have some pretty big expectations to fill, too. Quality, schmality – will your game be at the required level of pretentiousness to be a true Kojima Productions game, Dave? That’s what you should be worried about.
Lords of Shadow is scheduled to hit Xbox 360 and PS3 next year.
