An interview 1UP had with Treasure president Masato Maegawa reveals a lot of great new game development information. Below we’ll list the comments he made about each game.
About the Xbox 360 shooter: “It’s actually still early enough in the project that we don’t yet know how similar it will be to those games [Radiant Silvergun and Ikaruga]. I’m thinking we’ll probably want to go in a bit of a new direction now, though.” and “Yeah [its a top-down shooter]. We’ll use really great 3D graphics but it will retain the 2D gameplay people love.” It’s from “the same director and team [that did Ikaruga].” It’ll be a retail title, but Treasure are interested in Live Arcade, they just aren’t sure an original game will make sense to do…
About Genesis titles on Wii Virtual Console: “There are four of our Genesis titles that are legally OK to release on the Virtual Console now, so it’s probably just a matter of time. We’re also considering putting them on Live Arcade.”
About N64’s “Sin & Punishment: Successor to the Earth” on Wii Virtual Console: “Ah yes, it was on the Virtual Console list that Nintendo released a while back. They are planning to put it out on Virtual Console at some point, but it’s probably going to be a while still. It’s really up to Nintendo in terms of how they want to stagger things out – they could probably put 1,000 games on there tomorrow if they wanted, but obviously they don’t want to do that.” And they even mention they had worries re-releasing rare Treasure games was disrespectful to their hardcore fans, but hope people don’t see it that way, because introducing new players to these games is great for them and the industry. They better release this 3D rail-shooter worldwide, I loved my Japanese N64 import copy because the game was spoken entirely in English. Mischief Makers and Bangai-O are other must-have N64 2D shoot ’em ups.
About the future Wii title: “We love the Wii and want to work on it in the future, but right now we’ve got our hands full with the Xbox 360 and Nintendo DS. It’s just a matter of freeing up people in order to create a team to work on it. But absolutely, in the future, we’ll make a Wii game. We’ve already been in discussions with Nintendo about it. We’re just brainstorming right now, but I am already certain we’ll be able to do something really unique with it.” It’s hinted they might’ve started working on an action(-platformer) game already. Their development teams have no interest in next-gen sequels to Guardian Heroes or Gunstar Heroes though.
About a possible future PS3 title: “It’s not like we don’t want to, but right now we only have two or three teams to work on projects and I’m not sure when they’d be able to get to it. Then there’s the learning curve with the system – the team working on Xbox 360 will likely stick with Xbox 360 for future titles since they’ve already become familiar with it. Maybe in the future we’ll be able to, though.”
You can read the full interview at 1UP.