One of the great ironies of video games is the simple fact that when it comes right down to it, sometimes luck is the determining factor in whether a game is viewed as good or bad. Not the least of which is that sometimes the dev teams are “just trying to make things work” versus attempting to make “everything groundbreaking or perfect”. For proof of this, look no further than with Resident Evil 4.
In a special interview, developers on the game Shinji Mikami and Jun Takeuchi talked about what it was like making the game. Including how the now revolutionary camera angle didn’t come from anything more than them liking it\:
“It felt natural. Oddly enough. We weren’t planning on doing something innovative. But in the end, everyone kept saying we did. To us personally, we just thought that angle was better. We weren’t trying to do something new or groundbreaking, there was none of that.”
Oh, and they got special praise from that camera early on:
“The first person who praised the camera system in RE 4 was actually Masahiro Sakurai, the guy who makes Smash Bros. He came to check out the game in development and asked, ‘who came up with this camera system?’ ‘Hey, yeah, that was me.’ ‘This is great,’ he said. ‘Woah, really?’ I responded.”
Even now, the two can’t fully believe that Resident Evil 4 was the hit that it was:
“It’s weird. It doesn’t really hit you, even with all that praise. You’re not like, ‘I did it!’ It’s more like ‘This ought to work, I guess’. Like, in a fight when you punch them in a gut, even if you were holding back, when you see the other guy keel over in pain you think ‘woah, that got him, that did it. That actually did it.’”
Indeed, they did it.
