Game developer Mikoishi have developed mobile titles such as Phoenix Wright and Star Wars Battlefront Mobile, but have recently begun to concentrate on original IP and new platforms such as Nintendo DS and PC. Games On Deck talks to Mikoishi co-founder and chief creative officer Alex Goatcher about the new strategy.
Games On Deck: What does Mikoishi mean?
Alex Goatcher: The name Mikoishi comes from Japanese mythology. A maiden was released from the fast running river by God and she was so impressed that she devoted her life to a shrine and changed herself to a beautiful stone in the river.
GOD: Tell us about the company.
AG: Mikoishi was founded in 2001 with a vision to produce mass-market entertainment content with an initial focus on the mobile devices. Our first products made heavy use of mobile operators' location positioning technologies. We developed a location based mass-multiplayer shooter called Gunslingers and a location based social networking service called Pebblesoup. In the early days we had a broad view on mass-market entertainment and developed online mobile karaoke products, interactive comic books for mobile and social networking services.
Although now we focus on games, the experience served as a foundation for the games we build today, predominately online and persistent much of our learning from our social networking days is now core to our games - Our founding vision that mass-market entertainment will be a social experience is still very relevant, irrespective of the platform on which we design a product.
GOD: Tell us about the "Theatre" technology.
AG: Theatre is Mikoishi's development technology and operating platform for interactive entertainment products. It's been used extensively to power online multiplayer games for mobile phones and networks and is currently being used to support 2 PC MMOG products and a Nintendo DS title. Conceptually the platform is made up of 4 components
- 1) Theatre CentreStage - Online gaming middleware and SDK.
- 2) Theatre Arcade - Reusable Network services to support online games.
- 4) Theatre BoxOffice - Everything you need to monetise your product.
- 5) Theatre ControlRoom - Real-time analytics, reporting and content management tools.
GOD: How is it important to your mobile development?
AG: To push the envelope on mobile, due to device constraints, much of the heavy lifting needs to be delegated to servers. Theatre is especially suited for this, allowing developers to free up much needed client resources and offload assets and computational overhead to the network. For example binary assets can even be stored on the servers as well as save-game images, player profiles and lobby logic etc. In addition Theatre's deployment and operating capabilities enable us to manage the diversity in the mobile channels. We can deploy a single instance of a game in 40 countries, in 5 languages across 80% of devices and still handle the commercial diversity in all the channels.
GOD: Tell us about recent Mikoishi titles that you consider particular successes.
AG: Phoenix Wright was certainly successfully from a usage perspective. We got great feedback from Phoenix Wright fans who were happy that we had stayed true to the original game.
It was a full port of the first 4 turnabouts, word for word and scene for scene from the original Nintendo DS version. The 5th turnabout was designed specifically for the Nintendo DS and made much use of the touch screen for forensic investigation. The mobile version does not include turnabout 5.
Phoenix Wright, Super Puzzle Fighter II
GOD: What about Super Puzzle Fighter II - what was like to create a networked mobile title for Capcom? Did that use your "Theatre" tech?
AG: Yes, everything we develop uses Theatre technology. We had a lot of fun creating the mobile version of SPFII and many of the developers are diehard SPFII fans. Actually we now have an old coin-op SPFII machine in our rec room.
GOD: What was it like to work with Capcom?
AG: It's always exciting working with a major publisher. We worked extensively with the LA office, they handled all of the Japanese approvals.
