As much fun as older games are, figuring out how to modernize them can be tricky, says Capcom exec Chris Svensson.
Onimusha and Dino Crisis are two Capcom franchises that never quite made it to the big time. While they’re not exactly unprofitable, they’ve definitely fallen by the wayside and it’s been years since either series has had a new release. It would be easy to assume that the series are dead, but Svensson says they’re actually just waiting for a killer idea.
Svensson, who is Capcom’s VP of strategic planning and business development, said that the publisher has placed them both on the back burner until someone with a vision, and enough influence to make people listen, champions them internally. He said that Onimusha presented challenges because of its very strong Japanese theme, and that the series had seen significant declines in its fan base with each new iteration. He also said that no one could quite figure out what to do with Dino Crisis to actually make it fun again.
“You’d be amazed how many franchises where we’re like ‘oh that was great, that was amazing,’ but the question is how we make that a compelling and contemporary game experience,” he said. “As much as I love Dino Crisis, I don’t think pre-rendered backgrounds; tank-controlled dinos are going to sell to the level that’s going to cover the budgets that it takes to make something competitive in that space.”
Svensson does have a point with Onimusha, a game based on feudal Japan is a lot less familiar to most gamers than one based Europe, and therefore has much more of a niche appeal. Still, you’d think that it would much easier to come up with ideas for games involving dinosaurs, even if the technology in previous installments of Dino Crisis is showing its age.
I mean, seriously, they’re dinosaurs.
Source: IGN
