The undisputed star of Sony’s Gamescom press conference this year was not a mega-budget shooter or epic sci-fi fantasy, it was a game about a little girl holding a balloon and cowering away from the shadows. Afterwards in interviews, it was the game that SCE chief Andrew House kept referring to, the one everyone talked about. A game about a little girl holding a balloon, in search of her mother – and, of course, the inspired touchscreen interface behind it all. In Murasaki Baby, the player must hold the girl’s hand and guide her through the darkness.
Parallels have been drawn with Ico, but the game’s creator Massimo Guarini says the origins of the idea are more personal. “I was on a train and I saw a little girl with a balloon, holding her mother’s hand. The image was so beautiful, so striking to me that my brain immediately translated it into a character on a touchscreen, with the player’s hand grabbing hers.” Guarini is a videogame industry veteran, despite the fact that his native country effectively had no game industry when he began his career in the mid-’90s. “I started out designing websites,” he explains, “but I got the opportunity to move into games through Ubisoft; [it was] building an Italian production studio and I applied. I think I became the first game designer in Italy!”
At first he worked on Game Boy Color titles, converting Rayman to the platform, as well as many other franchises; later he moved to the Montreal office and contributed to the Tom Clancy titles as a senior designer. But he was always aiming for something else – or, more accurately, somewhere else. “My dream was to go to Japan,” he says. “I was an otaku about anime and manga, about the culture as a whole. I sort of worked it out by learning a little bit of Japanese and applying for jobs there.”
His ambition was realised, and then some. Guarini’s CV reached Grasshopper Manufacture, the cult studio behind Killer7, No More Heroes and Lollipop Chainsaw, and he was offered a job. “They said no Japanese skills would be required – but they actually were, I later found out,” says Guarini. “When I moved there, I had to learn Japanese just to survive, which was a good thing. It was a dream come true: I grew up with Japanese games and cartoons, and for years I’d been attracted by their approach to game design.”
Professionally, part of the allure was the escape from realism. “The big thing is that the Japanese don’t try to emulate reality all the time – they construct richer, more imaginative worlds, they have a surreal way of storytelling. Japanese pop culture is heavily influenced by manga, and making comics actually comes from ancient roots; it’s a tradition. Their culture is so visual… Here, we’re very attached to photographic realism, we see this as a medium dependent on technology. I spent ten years at Ubisoft making realistic games. The Tom Clancy series was all about simulation, and after a while I got really bored with that.”
And in Grasshopper’s idiosyncratic director, Goichi Suda, he had the perfect manager and creative inspiration. “It was an awesome experience,” Guarini enthuses. “I was totally into his vision, which is all about approaching videogames more from a pop-culture point of view. All of his games have this lo-fi digital punk attitude – and we really played up to that. He approaches design and storytelling from a surreal point of view; everything is exaggerated.”
The pair had such a good working relationship that Suda effectively handed over control of Shadows Of The Damned to Guarini, who revelled in the responsibility.
“Grasshopper triggered something in me,” he says. “It’s not like I suddenly became this surreal and grotesque guy – I’ve always been like that! But when I was working on Tom Clancy games I didn’t have the confidence to be disruptive. The Grasshopper experience gave me what was missing: this level of confidence, an I-don’t-give-a-shit attitude that makes you expose and express yourself.”
At Grasshopper, Guarini also met two other Japanese game design legends. He got on brilliantly with famed composer Akira Yamaoka, responsible for the audio design of the Silent Hill series. The two formed a band, Grasshopper Demanufacture, with Guarini on drums. They’re still in touch now. But there was a much more challenging presence in the studio. “I had more problems with Shinji Mikami… who I respect very much,” says Guarini. “He’s really a tough guy, and his reputation in Japan makes him something of an untouchable rockstar. It took six months for me to gain his trust. Before that, it was really painful; every single revision, every meeting was a challenge for me. He is an extremely intelligent person, and really he was challenging me – to wake me up to their way of doing things. Once he knew I was in line with him, he completely changed.”
In 2011, Guarini moved back to Italy with his pregnant wife. He set up Ovosonico with Gianni Ricciardi, another ex-Ubisoft employee, to bring Grasshopper’s surreal, fearless style to the west. He worked up a couple of prototypes and, via contacts accrued during his Ubisoft years, scored a meeting with Sony’s VP of worldwide studios, Michael Denny. The game he pitched at that point wasn’t right for Sony, but Guarini casually mentioned Murasaki Baby. Sony called the next day and offered to fund its development.
With a visual style influenced by early Tim Burton drawings, and a setting that draws from the classic Silly Symphonies cartoon Lullaby Land, Murasaki Baby is a dark fantasy platformer. Players must guide the lead character through a child’s imaginary world, avoiding enemies and removing areas of darkness. While the front touchscreen interacts with the character, the rear pad can be used to manipulate the backgrounds, utilising interactive objects. As with many indie projects nowadays, the game is built in Unity, an engine Guarini loves for the way it liberates designers. “The tools are now there for people who don’t even work in the industry – that’s really important,” he says. “Now people who have something to say can just grab Unity and do their stuff.”
Due out in 2014, Murasaki Baby is a fascinating project, but it’s just a taster of what Ovosonico wants to do. Guarini says his studio is platform agnostic, led by ideas not technology, but he has his eye on PlayStation 4. The ambition is to create truly emotional connections between the player and character. “We’re experiencing a transformation as creators,” he says. “We’re old enough as an industry to know that games aren’t just about the challenge; they can say something. Games like Journey and Dear Esther have proved that. We can trigger emotion, just like movies, but we can do it using our own vocabulary.”
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