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MIGS 2006: Tetsuya Mizuguchi’s keynote speech

By Katie . November 12, 2006 . 1:47pm

It’s been all wrapped up and sent first class to the books of videogame industry past, but when the floor had fallen silent at the MIGS, Siliconera walked out with all the best dirt – and boy, were they ever big, dirty floors! So although cleanup will take a while, just sit tight and we’ll have intimate accounts of a broad variety of the days’ conferences!

But every story has a beginning. And in the beginning, there was…

Keynote Speaker Tetsuya Mizuguchi – Inspiration-led creation: How we can design a game from the first inspiration

So where were we last update? I believe Mr. Mizuguchi had just walked out on stage, looking like a hip young upstart fresh off his motorcycle. But although his name has only recently become headline news with breakout titles Lumines and Meteos, Mr. Mizuguchi has actually been in the gaming fold for the last 16 of his 41 years, and is very humble about all his past works. After taking Media Aesthetics in university, which, as he told us, focuses on critiquing the arts and entertainment (and just so happens to be what I study!), the first company he joined – to my further surprise and delight – was SEGA. They lost a good man in 2003, when he left to form his enigmatically-entitled outfit, Q Entertainment, but, as time would tell, the industry gained something a little… more.

Every one of his creations is, as the title of his presentation suggests, a product of some inspiring source – heck, just the previous night, he had witnessed his very first NHL game, and I’m willing to bet that factors into his next title somehow. His story begins long before any of that, however, and so its teller proceeded, in a soft-spoken but enthusiastic manner, to recount the tale – from his great first love of Pong as an 11-year old boy, through flirtations with the formula racing genre – all the way up to where his true passion lies: making happy, fun, beautiful games for all. Our hardened gamer hearts sure were melting, ladies and gents.>

Sega Rally came with the birth pangs of 3D and his world travels circa 1993. The monochromatic, flat-shaded polygons of the time, though not his idea of gorgeous graphics, inspired him to call upon Fiat and Toyota to supply cars for the development of an arcade motion base for the game soon to come.

“They thought it was just a joke,” he says, “until they saw the game.”

Then he showed us a clip from the game itself, Sega Rally (1994-1995), and added, much to our amusement, “Wow. That is looking a little… old.” But for the time, I remember, it certainly set a benchmark.

The story would repeat itself with Manx TT SuperBike, put out in 1996. Travels to the Isle of Man, situated between England and Ireland and apparent home to the world’s oldest bike race, left him impressed by Honda’s competitive power, and together they collaborated to make a different kind of motion base – a giant joystick in the form of a bike. Manx TT, like Hang-On before it, was a technical feat in its time.

Come the time of the PlayStation and Dreamcast, he says, he started to move away from realism to the realm of entertainment by music and visuals. A performance by the dancing troupe Stomp, who use oil drums, industrial scrap and hardware implements to make music with motion, led him to emulate the fun of musicals and dance with Space Channel 5 for Dreamcast and Space Channel 5: Part 2 for PS2.

An executive producer in the States called him up one day to say Michael Jackson loved the idea, and wanted to be in Part 2. Mr. Mizuguchi recalls that he had nothing to say at first, except…

“Who is Michael?”

Later he would recognize him as a pioneer of pop, and put him right into the game. No audience cracks were made as to Jackson’s current status as pioneer in other ventures… our presenter deserved better than that.

A Wassily Kandinsky painting that exemplified synaesthesia, or the cross-sensorial phenomena whereby music can influence a visual expression, and a 1994 rave he attended in Zurich, Switzerland, showed him how pulsating lights and sounds like “dun dun dun dun… buraaaa!” played on a deep, basic instinct within people. From those experiences, Rez came to fruition in 2001 on the PS2. And even through the awkward laughter as a Trance Vibrator, an attachment of ill-repute sold with the game in Japan, jittered across a desk on the screen, he said it just goes to show how serious he was about the whole thing.

Lumines, and the second game that would launch one day from that morning came out of his love of music videos as a high-schooler in the early 80’s, notably Ah-Ha’s Take on Me. It could clearly be seen in the music video he then demoed for us, freshly-saved in Windows Movie Maker, and which evoked the groundbreaking animated-sketchbook style and colorized it, bringing it to new, high-def life. It really succeeded as part of his mission: I felt happy to see and hear Heavenly Star.

Lastly was Ninety Nine Nights, and its inspiration by Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon as well as current events in the war on terror, about which he doesn’t like to comment. Despite the heavier subject matter, he explained that humanity’s charm lies in our ability to understand all kinds of points of view, and that the games industry, as a reflection of that whole, is like a sponge, with no final form or limit. An uplifting fellow.

I even saw him leaving my same lunch line later, meaning he might have gotten Smoked Ham and Cheese on a bun, too. Meaning we should all try to, and we all can be, a little more like Mr. Mizuguchi.