Koji Igarashi On Leaving Konami And The Pressure Of Kickstarter With Bloodstained

Castlevania series producer Koji Igarashi has been hard at work with Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night, but he recently talked about leaving Konami and the pressure of Kickstarter in an E3 2017 interview with Kotaku.

On leaving Konami and adjusting to the pressure of Kickstarter:

Koji Igarashi, Bloodstained producer: With Castlevania, I’d been working on a long-running franchise where fans knew more about the games than I did. With Bloodstained, the pressure that we feel isn’t much different. There’s still hardcore fans who know more that we do. That’s a good kind of pressure, not bad, and something that we always feel and have gotten used to.

 

One thing that was challenging was creating material to show to backers for a new title. What we’re used to, especially in the Japanese industry, is sharing promotional material around three months before the release date to create hype. There isn’t always much hype after that. It can feel like you’ll run out of material to show people, and that’s been a challenge with Bloodstained.

On differentiating Bloodstained from his work on Castlevania:

Igarashi: Well, the core concept of Bloodstained is having that same gameplay experience as games from the past. The story and the characters and plot are quite different, but what we really did want to capture was having the same experience from the past and being able to play it now.

On Yoko Taro’s comments about wanting “less competition” from developers:

Igarashi: I feel the opposite and want more people to make games. I want more and more games and to keep working. I want to go back to the time of the SNES, when so many developers were creating new types of games.

 

I really loved the chaotic feeling during that time when everyone was creating games. Right now there’s a lot of AAA titles, but it seems like the indie games are where the passion is, and I’d like to see more of that.

You can read the rest of the interview here.

Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night is set to release in early 2018 for PC, PlayStation 4, PlayStation Vita, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch.