Yukihito Morikawa – 2000 Developer Interview

—I learned about your CG work through the show Ugougoruuga, but had you done any CG before that?

Morikawa: Yeah, I created CG for late-night television. I did that for a long time. Shows like IQ Engine, Einstein, things like that. There were no sponsors, and the people running the shows didn't supervise me in any way. It was basically a timeslot for young directors whose work wouldn't be suitable for primetime tv.

—How did you come to make CG for these late-night programs?

Morikawa: After graduating college, I did illustrations for some magazines, and took it pretty easy. Then this weird machine came out called the "Amiga". My former upperclassman at college, Tsunekazu Ishihara, was employed at a CG production company called Sedec, and he introduced me to work that involved using the Amiga to make CG. Ishihara was a passionate Amiga fan, and he had started this business not to make CG per se, but rather to proselytize to a wider audience the wonders of the Amiga itself. He never missed a chance to use the Amiga, to draw graphs or make CG window borders for TV programs, for example.

—Really? Why?

Morikawa: Oil paints smell bad. And they also don't dry. You go back thinking you'd like to fix a spot or touch something up, and the colors would all run together. That was demoralizing to me.

I realized that oil painting didn't fit my personality, so I switched to graphic design. There I studied magazine layout and typography, illustration, printing, and all those things. But the idea of being a designer didn't really click with me either. I didn't care about that level of precision… I didn't care if something was a millimeter off, or slightly off center, or whatever. So in my fourth year of college I stopped going to classes, and ultimately it took me six years to graduate. At the time Ishihara was teaching in the Integrated Design (sougou zoukei) department. That department was more geared towards modern art—things that wouldn't be included in a typical museum, and it was full of weirdos. Ishihara was there (two years above me), and Rin Inumaru was there, and one year above me was Naoya Tomiyama. Iwai-kun was also there, two years below than me. We all passed by each other in the school lobby quite often.

—Did you make anything with Ishihara while you were in school?

Morikawa: No, we never worked together. I helped out at one of his events though. The idea of "cybernetics" was all the rage then, and he hosted an event where they hooked up sensors up to your arm and the muscle movements would make a machine move. I helped transport the computers for that.

—Compared to oil painting, CG allows you to revise your work as much as you want. That must have been a much better fit for you.

Morikawa: The Amiga really amazed me. It only had 32 colors, and the pixels were coarse. The resolution was only 320x200. But it had this superb paint program called Deluxe Paint that made it easy to create animation. It was a perfect fit for my impatient personality. Apparently most artists are very resistant to the idea of swapping their brush out for a mouse. That's because when you're painting, your line of sight is aligned with your hand that's holding the paintbrush; with CG, however, you're looking at the screen instead. It takes most people a lot of time to adapt to that, but it never felt weird to me.

—So the CG you made for your television work was done on the Amiga. Did you ever use any other computers?

Morikawa: Back then, most professional CG was made on very expensive computers. For cheap late-night programming, it would have used all of our budget to produce just one second of CG on those machines. We also worked on crazy schedules, where they'd record on the weekend and air everything that Monday. Ugo Ugo Ruuga was like that too, by the way. I remember times where we'd literally be making revisions 2 hours before it aired! The Amiga was the only machine back then that was suited to that kind of breakneck schedule. I used to take a taxi to the studio, carrying my Amiga and about 40 floppy disks, and I'd directly hook into the machine there. It was like being a plumber and hauling your huge bag of equipment with you. I had to do it that way, because sometimes they would say stuff like "we want this logo for this scene" and I'd have to make it there on the spot. Thanks to that I became very quick at working, though.

—How were you involved in Ugo Ugo Ruuga?

Morikawa: If you recall, that show had a lot of 7-second and 15-second mini-segments. I would bring my own work in for those segments. Others who contributed to the show included Hideyuki Tanaka of Flame Graphics, Derubi Uruma, Kitsune Akimoto… it was an incredible group of talented people. I made stuff like "Aniki", which narrated miniature versions of fairy tales in an RPG-ish style. I monopolized that work. With how crazy everything was it's amazing there weren't more accidents. (laughs) We had a staff room in an office building at Akebonobashi, and towards the end I was constantly there. It was insane. Honestly it was all insane from the beginning. (laughs)

—It's strange how so many people working on Ugo Ugo Ruuga ended up working in game development.

Morikawa: Yeah. A few years back I was spending a lot of time at Sony, and Enix too. It became a running joke with how many gamedevs came from that show: "Ugo Ugo Ruuga, they're a game developer right?" I don't know how the others ended up getting hired in gamedev, but when people found out I came from the show it was like, "Oh, you too?"

—What kind of work did you do after Ugo Ugo Ruuga ended?

Morikawa: Towards the end of my time at Ugo Ugo, I picked up work from some other TV networks. I did an early morning English program, and some NHK educational content (Weekly Kids News). I did that for awhile. But I get bored of things more quickly than the average person. By the latter half of Ugo Ugo I was bored of it, too, and I was generally just tired of the TV station workplace. It's a very inflexible environment, with little room for change.

—So after having experienced work in a TV station, what was your next obsession?

Morikawa: There wasn't one. (laughs) The Playstation was just getting started towards the end of Ugo Ugo. It was still referred to as the "PSX" in those days. I had been thinking about joining Nintendo, and I forget how it happened exactly, but a software producer approached me and persuaded me to join him in making Playstation games. "In the future games won't just be for kids. Let's make those games together."

I asked him, "What if I make a game that kids won't be able to understand at all?" and he said that was OK. Nothing concrete was put in motion then, but we talked about three different ideas I had for games, one of which included Ganbare Morikawa-kun (Pet in TV).

—Ugo Ugo was a children's program. Well, actually it's kind of hard to call it a kid's program when you think about it. But I can understand the desire to make something geared towards adults, after working in that environment for so long.

Morikawa: Up to that point, games had always been aimed at kids. Remember how all the manuals had full furigana? I felt like I couldn't make a game like that. That childlike spirit is something I've never really had, even when I was a child. And to be honest, I don't think anyone on the Ugo Ugo staff was thinking about children when they were making the show. (laughs)

—What was it like to be at Sony Computer Entertainment (SCE) right there at the beginning?

Morikawa: There was a lot of energy. At that time Sony was a latecomer to the home console market. No one believed they would succeed. And because of that, everyone at Sony was pretty wild. There were also musicians on Sony's staff who had come from Pony Canyon and Sony Music. The guerilla-style promotion the music people did was incredible… there was this spirit of wanting to smash all the previous conventions. It was a fun time to be there. When there's no format, that's when you can make something new. Everyone was riding a high.

—Soon after the Playstation was released, MuuMuu released Jumping Flash.

Morikawa: That game was originally being developed for the X68000 by Exact, a team based in Niigata. It was a game where you control a robot and crush enemies by jumping on them, but the team felt that releasing it as-is, it would get buried and overlooked as just another game…

—"Just another game?" How do you mean?

Morikawa: The game market had gone a bit koo-koo by then. (laughs) They came to us asking us to essentially re-skin the game.

—So they contracted it out to you to make it stand out more.

Morikawa: I think if you had released their original vision today, no one would object. But back then, the atmosphere was such that releasing a "regular" game was seen as a cardinal sin. So we replaced all the characters from their original X68000 version. Nowadays we get along great with the members of Exact, but at the time it was a much more hostile relationship. Here we were putting all of our own characters in the game, and what's more, we went and re-tuned the difficulty to make it much easier. It was like we loosened all the screws on what they had built.

—Loosening the screws... that was your job?

Morikawa: Jumping Flash came out first, but we had actually already started developing Ganbare Morikawa-kun (Pet in TV) by then.

—Ganbare Morikawa-kun (Pet in TV) was equipped with an impressive AI system. I understand it was a long development.

Morikawa: We made Ganbare completely from scratch, almost to a fault. The character design, AI, and the game interface too. I didn't know anything about AI, so I started out by studying up. I think I read over 30 or 40 books on the topic. The truth is, I naively thought that the programmers would just be able to do all that stuff on their own. That was when I learned that there are programmers who are bad at math. They can use the functions from pre-built libraries easily enough, but engineering and physics-based math was impossible for them. My image of programmers was totally different so this astonished me.

—Gameplay aside, I always thought the title of that game was interesting too. Putting your own name in there like that was something unprecedented.

Morikawa: It's a horrible, horrible title. I hate that they used my own name for it. I honestly didn't know they did that until it was too late. All of a sudden my name was there. I think it was to make it clear to everyone who was responsible… (laughs)

—Why did you choose AI for theme of this development, though? It's not exactly a simple subject.

Morikawa: For Ganbare, I wanted to make a game with low tension. Most video games require you to be in a state of heightened tension and stress while you play. I didn't like that. I wanted a low-stakes game where you could flip it on in the morning before heading out to work (leaving it on), and then casually pick it up without missing a beat when you got home. When I asked myself what would allow for such an autonomous sytem, AI was the answer.

—You didn't major in the hard sciences yourself, though.

Morikawa: Yeah. That's why I had to read up on all these textbooks that had functions and formulas in them related to AI. As it turned out though, gamers dislike AI. The issue is that AI has a certain unpredictable element… unlike traditionally programmed games where you would collect a certain number of items and a flag would be set, and this was always the same, with AI things are always changing subtly. Players liked the lifelike character designs, but if the internal logic of the game becomes too life-like, players start to dislike it.

—Up till then, you'd worked exclusively as a CG artist, but on Ganbare you were responsible for the programming, system design, and everything else. This was your first time creating something from the foundation up, wasn't it?

Morikawa: It was my first time, yes. As you can imagine I found it very engaging. It was similar to how actors sometimes go on to become directors. When I was making CG, I was just another actor. I was given a lot of freedom, to be sure, but I could only create a part of the picture, not the whole thing. Now I work as a director. I still do CG work from time to time, which I suppose is similar to the way directors will sometimes make appearances in their own movies.

—Being able to work as both director and actor makes me think of Beat Takeshi.

Morikawa: I think Beat Takeshi works as an actor only reluctantly, which I can relate to. There's times when I want to hand off the graphics work to someone else, but when the idea you have in your head is somewhat vague or undefined, it's difficult (and annoying) to convey that to another person. So you end up saying fine, I'll just do it myself. If the thing I want someone to create can be reduced to blueprints, then it doesn't matter who builds it so long as they follow those blueprints. Unfortunately, designing graphics and characters in a video game isn't that kind of work. How do you convey an idea to someone that only exists clearly in your own mind? With things like that I just do it myself.

—Having created so many characters, do you have any funny quirks or habits while you're drawing?

Morikawa: I sometimes talk with my characters. Probably everyone who draws characters does that, I think. I write down what they say too. That helps me with writing their dialogue later. I also observe the characters, staring at them for a long time until I see them move. That time spent observing them is very important. It gives me ideas for how they'll move in the game, which I then write down for later.

—Are there characters that don't speak to you?

Morikawa: There are some who never move at all.

—And who are some of the characters who have been particularly lively when you created them?

Morikawa: Pukka from "Koko hore! Pukka" talked a lot to me. Actually, before I designed Pukka, I had wanted the protagonist of that game to be a superrr dirty bear. That character moved a lot. In the end, though, the staff vetoed that bear and it never got used.

—How is drawing with a computer different from drawing by hand?

Morikawa: It's a pain to draw on computers when the rendering is slow, when the speed of the computer doesn't match the speed at which I'm coming up with ideas. Everything is simultaneous when you're drawing by hand, but there's a timelag with the computer. That can be frustrating. The Amiga was the best machine for minimizing that, in my experience. It was super fast at rendering. That's why I loved it.

—How do you take a character from a design sketch to a 3D model?

Morikawa: The 3D modeling process is very challenging. The whole process of getting that 3D model as close as possible to my initial sketches is tough. After the modeler has finished a first draft, I take a look at it and point out various things to fix, and we make revisions. It's not a very ordered or rational process, and there's probably a more efficient way to do it, but it never turns out well when I try another way.

—What direction do you think MuuMuu's games will take in the future?

Morikawa: I have this idea of designing something that isn't a game—maybe it plays on a home console, but it's a different kind of home entertainment. The first video games were created at colleges, on the computers there. Then they made their way to cafes and game centers, and finally into our homes. Games and humans have gradually been coming closer and closer together, in other words. Today the cell phone is the closest they've come yet. I suspect that in the future, visual entertainment will bifurcate into two types: the TV screen and the cell phone screen. I think the TV is the perfect fit for more passive entertainment. For me, there's something old-fashioned now about a person holding a controller in front of a TV screen.

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