Excerpt from a talk with Cerny and Layden. Interesting stuff about trying to bring Western games to Japan, Crash Bandicoot, and their early relationships with ND, Sucker Punch, Insomniac, and Guerilla.
Cerny: Your challenge, if I understand it, was to sell to western games in Japan. What could go wrong?
Layden: [laughs] Those of who are old enough, or who read history, there’s a platform called the PlayStation. At that time Japanese developers were just crushing it. Games like Tekken and Ridge Racer and of course Final Fantasy VII. I had the job, in Tokyo, of taking western games and bringing them to the Japanese market. Trying to say, “Forget Tekken! You want Mortal Kombat! Forget Ridge Racer! You want Destruction Derby!” It was a hard slog.
I say this with no offense to my European and American counterparts who made those games and made a fortune in their own countries, but bringing them to Japan was impossible. Western games just could not catch on. Probably the biggest-selling western game I was able to work on in Japan was Formula One. Japan has a huge Formula One fan base. But even that was only about 500,000 units.
Cerny: What everybody said was that no western title could sell more than 200,000 units in Japan.
Layden: Most of my western titles couldn’t sell 30,000 units in Japan. So yes, you’re right.
Except the most successful western title on the PlayStation—it came through our shop. It was immediately taken away from my international software group and pulled into the standard Japanese production group. This one little title called Crash Bandicoot. We wanted to do that on my team, but this guy named Shu Yoshida snatched it off our desk and took it into the standard domestic production house.
The localization job was incredible.
Naughty Dog were fantastic developers. Of course my colleague here Mark Cerny was deeply involved in the original Crash. That’s where we met. You came to Japan to pick up an award.
Cerny: Right! And
we met Hideo Kojima at that awards ceremony.
Layden: All these roads come back to Crash. But like I say, we’re not old. We’re vintage. Put that in all your stories.
Cerny: That was a great time in the ‘90s.
All of these teams and people that are household names today were just getting in the business. Andy and Jason at Naughty Dog, I think you met them when they were seven people. I met them when they were just two people.
Layden: Back when games only cost a million dollars to make.
Cerny: Well, we were making incredibly expensive games for under $2 million. Or your first meeting with Sucker Punch, when they had their little cabin in the woods.
Layden: Yeah, those crazy Microsoft refugees who created Sucker Punch. They were out in the woods. You had to drive down past the old mill and turn down a road with no name.
Cerny: Microsoft wasn’t in the games business at the time.
It was Microsoft Office that they’d worked on. They decided to escape and found a little game developer.
Layden: They had this game about a thieving raccoon, which we jumped on, and it became part of that.
Cerny: Or Insomniac, when it was just Ted Price and the Hastings brothers.
Layden: Spyro, that’s when you worked with them, right? When you discovered them.
Cerny: Yes, and Disruptor, the shooter.
Layden: And now they’re working on Spider-Man. You may have heard of that. Or you’ll be hearing about it.
Cerny: Guerrilla, when you started working with them, were they already Guerrilla? Were they Lost Boys? They were working on a title called Kent or–
Layden: They were working on a title called Kim. Very charismatic, the Guerrilla people. I say that because one of them is here. It was a great challenge, to see their potential.
They had a fantastic first-person shooter called Kim. We couldn’t get that trademark, so it became Killzone.
https://venturebeat.com/2018/07/01/...icarus-moment-to-managing-3000-devs/view-all/