Japan's Next Generation.(videogame designers: Shinji Mikami, Tomonobu Itagaki, Tetsuya Mizuguchi)(Brief Article)(Interview)

The best Japanese videogame designers are not household names. Unless, that is, you're an avid player, in which case Tomonobu Itagaki, Shinji Mikami and Tetsuya Mizuguchi will rank with the likes of rock stars and movie icons. Itagaki, who produces games for Tecmo, is best known for his Dead or Alive series of fighting games. Mikami's Biohazard franchise, released by Capcom, introduced true horror to the console. And Mizuguchi, who founded the Sega subsidiary United Game Artists, has broken new ground with music-based games such as Space Channel 5 and his upcoming effort, the K-Project. NEWSWEEK's N'Gai Croal and Kay Itoi gathered the three in Tokyo to discuss their fast-changing industry.

NEWSWEEK: How did you become game designers?

MIKAMI: I was baited. I went to a party at the Hilton Hotel, which was so gorgeous and I went because I could eat for free. It was 1989. I was in school at the time, majoring in product merchandising, but I didn't study that hard--I was a typical Japanese student.

ITAGAKI: I wanted to become a novelist. I studied for that for a long time, but I gave up that dream. Still, I wanted to be on the side of creating something and sending a message.

MIZUGUCHI: I wanted to do something related to entertainment, but I didn't find much possibility in film, television and movies--those media seemed old-fashioned. This sounds strange, but I felt that the possibilities for these media were already exhausted. When I joined Sega I said I had no interest in making games. I wanted to be in the entertainment business in a bigger sense, creating theme parks and attractions and I was placed in the amusement-park group.

How do the new game consoles that are being developed affect the process of making games?

MIZUGUCHI: Our workload is truly increasing substantially. It takes more money, more time and more people than before. Everything is evolving too fast. The hardware improvements have been so fast that it is hard to keep up with them. It has only been five or six years since the production process has dramatically changed because of polygon- based graphics. I think it took them 100 years or so from the Wright brothers' planes to jumbo jets, but the same thing happened for games in just five or 10 years.