360 degrees of flight, how Ace Combat came to the Xbox 360

We know that Eternal Sonata isn’t an Xbox 360 exclusive in Japan and it’s possible that Beautiful Katamari may go multiplatform in the future. But what about the Ace Combat series, which has predominantly been on Sony consoles? Back at Namco Bandai’s offices I briefly spoke to Naotaka Higashiyama about his decision to make Ace Combat 6: Fires of Liberation an Xbox 360 exclusive.

Why didn’t you choose to bring the Ace Combat series to the Playstation 3? The Sixaxis controller seems like a natural fit with the series.

I wanted to bring the next version of the series to the users as quickly as possible. The Xbox hardware was around and ready for development. It was basically a question of getting it out.

Do you think we’ll see another installment on the PS3 or another console in the future?

We haven’t thought about it yet. We just finished Ace Combat 6.

Congrats on that! But the Xbox 360 hasn’t done particularly well in Japan. So how do you think market will respond to Ace Combat 6 being an Xbox 360 exclusive?

As soon as we released Ace X on the PSP, I heard a lot of people went out and bought a PSP to play it. I hope that a lot of people will pick up an Xbox 360 in Japan to play this. I feel if more games like this comes out it could increase the popularity of the Xbox 360 in Japan.