In an interview with CVG, KCEJ's Manager of Product Design Mr Atsushi Horigami (translation: a top executive at Konami), revealed his positive view on the Gamecube and Nintendo's approach to their upcoming console.

CVG: Are you impressed by what Nintendo is saying about Gamecube? A lot of what you are doing is driven by ideas rather than technical demonstrations. Is Nintendo’s strategy for Gamecube a good one, and do you believe in it?

Horigami-san: I think that Nintendo are right in their own way. At the same time Sony’s strategy with PlayStation 2 is correct – that they make it a DVD player at the same time. That’s what made it a big seller in Japan, what they’re doing is not wrong. That’s a way of selling machines. You can have lots of games with MPEG2 quality, and good CG quality.

But I also like what Nintendo is saying about making Gamecube a pure game machine. I like their strong belief that it should be a pure game machine. The thing is that I really want Nintendo to sell a lot of units just to get a big share in the whole console market because I personally would like to develop games for Gamecube, but if they only sell a certain amount of units my games are not going to sell that many just because of the installed base. So I really hope that it becomes a successful machine.

CVG: Do you think that great ideas alone are enough to attract new users? Or have videogames reached the stage where they need to be contained within something else that’s cool – for example PlayStation 2/Xbox with DVD?

Horigami-san: The first thing I’m going to say isn’t anything drastic, I mean everyone says it, but Nintendo should bring in some powerful launch titles. These would probably sell the machine. At the same time pricing – I don’t know if PlayStation 2 was considered cheap or expensive in Japan but I believe that Nintendo will make the price much cheaper than PlayStation 2, and that will help sell units.

I personally think that the game industry should go one of two ways – either you have a few powerful machines that are different enough so that it’s clear that a certain company wants to develop for this machine and not the other. Or have one ultimate machine – you know monopolise. We don’t want there to be a bunch of machines that are all similar in performance and companies have no idea which system they should develop for – we don’t want to see that.

CVG: Nintendo believes that if people will be able to make great ideas work quickly, as opposed to PlayStation 2. Is this true? In your experience is PS2 difficult to develop for – would you prefer to work on a system that gave you more freedom?

Horigami-san: I’ve never worked on Gamecube so I don’t know how easy it is to develop for. However Nintendo keeps on stressing that it is an easy system to develop for and we know that N64 was a difficult machine to develop for, and Nintendo admitted it – they said it themselves. So now that Nintendo is saying that it’s easy to develop for the Gamecube, I’d like to believe what they say. I’d like to believe that what they say is correct.

Thing is, we are developing Ephemeral Fantasia and 7 Blades for PlayStation 2, and it’s been taking us two or three years. We game creators would love to pump out more games because we have so many ideas that we want to realise as games, and if Gamecube really allows us to do that – you know, let us pump out one great game a year – that would be great. We’d really love to develop for Gamecube if that’s true. So we really hope it’s true.