It’s almost fitting that Keiji Inafune, best known as the creator of Mega Man, is the proud owner of a giant pair of brass balls.
Two of Inafune’s more recent projects, Dead Rising and Lost Planet, have become big moneymakers for Capcom. But the company didn’t have the utmost confidence in them when development began. In fact, the publisher canceled both games when they were still in the prototype stage. Expecting this outcome, Inafune and his team continued work on the games in secret and he went back to his bosses a second time. Not wanting to lose all the money Inafune spent on developing both games, Capcom executives gave the go-ahead to push them into full production.
The rest, as they say, is history.
Inafune was prepared to be fired for his act of treason. But he did it to fight back against a rule at Capcom that mandated that 80% of the company’s output had to be a sequel to a previously released game. So all those Street Fighter/Resident Evil/Mega Man sequels? They were the result of an actual company policy to sequelize everything. That explains so much.
Inafune believes his work on Dead Rising and Lost Planet (and their eventual blockbuster sales numbers) saved Capcom from bankruptcy. We’ll never know for sure, but if the father of Mega Man said it, I believe it.
[Soruce: Andriasang]
