Def Jam: Icon

• Platform: Xbox 360, Playstation 3
• Published by: Electronic Arts
• Developed by: EA Chicago
• Release Date: March 2007
• Genre: Fighting
• Multiplayer: Yes
• Online: Yes

Screenshot Gallery

Kudo Tsunoda Interview Continued..

Shack: How did you get involved in game development? What's your background?

Kudo Tsunoda: It's always a funny story when you come from a producer background. I'm the [general manager] here but at least when I was growing up there wasn't university schooling that would explain to you how to be a gameplay producer. Engineers, you can go get a computer science degree, and people understand that. Artists, you can make a demo reel, and everybody understands that. With producers, it's like, how the heck did you get in the industry? Everybody's got a funny story. Mine was that I used to work in this pool hall as a day bartender, and there was a guy who came in three times a week to play pool. I was just goofing off in the bar one time, and I had my game system hooked up to the TV. I wasn't that busy, so I was cranking out on the game, and the guy comes up to me and say, "Looks like you're pretty good at video games." I say, "Well, I play them all the time," blah blah blah.

He was the CFO at Philips Media, which way back in the day--and I don't mean to date myself here--was working on the CD-I, which was one of the first real disc-based console systems, and the first industry job I had was becoming a gameplay hint line operator. People would call up for $2.99 a minute, saying, "Hey I'm stuck in level seven, where's the golden key?" and I would tell them how to get past that part. From there, I went from gameplay hint line operator to gameplay tester--and I thought I made the big time, that I had hit QA and that's as big as it gets. Then, I worked as a production coordinator, moved up to big time job of getting lunches and organizing supply cabinets, and then finally assistant producer, associate producer, producer, senior producer, executive producer, VP, GM. So it was gameplay hint line operator up to GM of EA Chicago.

Shack: Not bad.

Kudo Tsunoda: Yeah! And I really think there's a good amount of learning by me actually just working up through all different positions and all different types of job skills within the game development framework. That's been something I'm kind of proud of, that that's my history--not that I just got in because I knew somebody, but because I really worked my way up and experienced a lot of different things and have a lot of perspective on the different job roles within our company.

Shack: How long have you been at EA specifically?

Kudo Tsunoda: Almost four years now.

Shack: When you were testing on the CD-I, did you ever play any of those horrible wacky Zelda games?

Kudo Tsunoda: Oh yeah. There was a whole range. The wacky Zelda games, then I don't know if you ever played Burn Cycle. That was one of the first games I was trying to incorporate live video into the gameplay experience. Whole bunch of different games, but that was one of those consoles that was trying to be, like, half encyclopedia, half game console. That kind of scheme really didn't work out too well.

Shack: I have seen you called in several instances the [Team NINJA head] Tomonobu Itagaki of the Western games industry. (This is likely due to similarities in the two producers' demeanor, long hairstyle, and frequent use of sunglasses. -Chris) Do you have any thoughts on that?

Kudo Tsunoda: I think it's always funny, any of those comparisons. It's people's way of applying something they already understand to something else. I do think that the cool thing about that is that--and I don't want to just keep saying the same thing over and over--the work we do at this studio is very focused on delivering new and different types of gameplay experiences. That's a big plus in that some of that comparison comes where you have two wacky minds coming up with new things. I always take that kind of stuff as a compliment. It's a good sign of what we're doing, always pushing for a new gameplay experience. The only thing that I ever find weird about that is that there are 150 people who work here, and everyone is focused on delivering that fun gameplay. So much work by so many people goes into it, and on some level I'm just the frontman. It's like the lead singer of a band. There are all these talented musicians and just because you're the one who goes out and represents the product, you're the one who gets these types of comparisons, but I don't see it as much a comparison to me as much as to our entire studio here.

Shack: How do you feel about the role of name recognition or studio recognition in the games industry? It's kind of ebbed and flowed a bit. There have been times in the games industry where people really talked about specific designers and studios, and there have been times that are less concerned with that and more about publishers. How important is that to you?

Kudo Tsunoda: It's really interesting, in that if you think about the record industry, everybody knows the artists who are making the music, but it's not like everybody is familiar with the publisher who puts out the album. It's all about the artist who is creating it. I think that in game making, it's not really individuals, but you should know the team that's making it. If EA Chicago has done Fight Night, Def Jam: Icon, you know their next game is going to be kickass. I always know who makes the game. You start to find out who are the people who are bringing something new to the table, and who are the teams who are just taking Grand Theft Auto, putting guys with bling in it, and calling it Saint's Row. There are those kinds of game makers out there putting out the same kind of product, and on the consumer end of my life I try and identify the teams doing new cool stuff and then I go play their games. Even a better analogy is a movie industry, where so many people know Tom Cruise is in a movie, but really the person who has the most creative impact is the director. I much more gravitate to, say, if I see it's a Kevin Smith film or a Wes Anderson production I'm likely to check it out. It's the same thing in games. If you know who's making the game and you know they're doing good work, you want to check it out.

Shack: Do you feel that EA as a global company does a good job allowing studios to foster an identity in game development and corporate lifestyle?

Kudo Tsunoda: Yeah. I think that's a good part about working with EA, that each studio has a totally different look and feel. LA's different than our studio in San Francisco, which is different than Chicago, which is different than Tiburon. Each of them definitely has its own personality and its own flair. I think the thing that EA does really well is that--well, there are advantages to being the biggest publisher. Out of every company I've ever worked at in the video game industry, EA is the best at allowing somebody like myself to have an idea that is cool and creative, and to actually get that idea into the product. The resources and the technology that we have here really allow for ideas to get into the game in high quality. That's the great thing about working for EA and the size of EA, that they're really allowing each of the teams, even within studios, to have their own personality and their own way of doing things, because that is the best of way for good games to get made.

Shack: So speaking of people doing cool new stuff, who's doing that now? What have you been playing lately?

Kudo Tsunoda: I play all types of games, certainly, because I've always played games and that's what I enjoy. But, you know, once you're in the industry, you're always checking out other games. One thing I'm just really proud of is a lot of the groundbreaking stuff coming out of EA. Like Spore, which isn't really available to general consumers yet, I'm just cracking out on that thing. That game is just so fun. Just totally blowing people away with a new way of playing games. I'm also a big fan of pretty much anything that's multiplayer and allows trash-talking. Madden football, I've been a fan of that for a long time so it's kind of fun because before I worked here I'd think "Man, this game is so fun, I'd love to play somebody on the development team because I bet I could kick their ass." Now I'm able to go down and actually put my skills to the test like that.

Shack: This could be a case of coincidental parallel development, or perhaps creative inspiration, but one thing that struck me as I was watching Def Jam was that it almost seems--at least in terms of the backgrounds--like a fighting game version of Lumines. Was there any inspiration there from [Lumines, Rez, and Meteos producer Tetsuya] Mizuguchi, or from Lumines in particuar?

Kudo Tsunoda: Well, we look at all games, and I think on some level all of the games you see affect your thoughts in some way, even if it's not direct. But on the next-gen consoles, one of the things that's been disappointing to me so far is that everybody's still shooting for photorealism. There's nothing wrong with that, that's what we did on Fight Night Round 3, but--and maybe this is a little bit of the pissy artists in me--if all as game developers we're able to achieve is photorealism, then I think we fail. That's not really to me the art of video games, making everything real. What you can do is use the photorealism as a base, and then trick it out to pay off the style or content of your game. Really, our big focus was on making it look and play like a hip hop video, so that mold was the primary design focus, and then getting to the "next generation of art," that photo realism base that's stylized or tricked out. I think a good example of that is, have you seen the movie Sin City?

Shack: Yeah.

Kudo Tsunoda: Well, obviously they started with actors, with real life people, but they had such a stylized look to create the look and feel with that film. I'm hoping that other developers will start going towards that kind of stylized and artistic intepretation, instead of just "Let's make it photoreal, photoreal, photoreal, and that's all we can do."

Shack: This is becoming sort of a de facto question these days in about 95% of industry interviews, but would your studio ever consider approaching the Wii?

Kudo Tsunoda: For sure. The Wii is a great system, and if you think about everything we like doing here with gestural control, well that system's all about the gestural control. We're going to work on anything that can give us the opportunity to be creative. The PS3 has stuff that we can do with it, the 360 has stuff that we can do with it, the Wii has stuff that we can do with it. All different hardware all has their own cool thing that we can use as a launching point. I mean, yeah, it's a cool frigging machine.

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