Anime News Network has a regularly run games column called ‘The X Button’, and recently they got to sit down with Keiji Inafune (famous for his work on Megaman but also a pivotal figure in Dead Rising’s development) along with his Dead Rising 2 colleague and co-producer Shinsaku Ohara about Dead Rising 2′s development.

It’s about as disturbing as you might expect.

Why did you use a game show as the initial setting for Dead Rising 2′s storyline?

Keiji Inafune: We started off by thinking realistically about what would happen in the real world if there were a zombie outbreak. And I think that if enough time went by it would become a normal part of life, and eventually…especially in America, no offense…people would use it as opportunity to make money. And the easiest way to make money would be to put these zombies on television, to use them as a prop. So if we could work that into a game and have characters that were in it for the money, so to speak, it would go in a direction that we hadn’t seen before.

No, it’s not the new direction WE would be hoping for, as the upcoming game features the same recipe of snarky humor combined with buckets of gore that fans of the first spectacle are craving to this day.

Inafune also, for an added bonus, directed a b-movie Zombie flick to accompany the game:

What inspired you in making Zombrex? What directors, American or Japanese, did you look to?

Inafune: The inspiration for Zombrex: Dead Rising Sun was less about my desire to direct and more about my love of low-budget ’80s movies. Of course, we were only able to secure a small budget, so it worked out well, but even if that weren’t the case, my goal was to make a movie with the look and feel of the low-budget movies we enjoyed back in the ’80s.

Sigh. Yet more Raimi-esque splatter that has to be played on my Xbox? This surge in anti-Zombie media from Japan is proving particularly disturbing. I mean, the ZRC expects this stuff from the United States and Europe. That’s a given. But Japan? Oh, how we had hoped for more enlightenment from a culture where even demons can be made into cuddly non-threatening characters for girls to fawn over. *cough*Inuyasha*cough*

At any rate, this fall the ZRC will have yet another Zombie massacre game WITH accompanying movie to wade through for The Cause. Remember though: we play them so that you don’t have to.

Tags: Videogames

This entry was posted by John Sears on Thursday, August 12th, 2010 at 10:11 pm and is filed under Zombie Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.