THE MAKING OF MONSTER HUNTER

At the turn of the millennium, console online gaming was the industry’s new wild frontier. Sega had blazed the trail with the Dreamcast, albeit with mixed results, no less due to the console’s own short lifespan. But with the PS2 at the peak of its popularity, Capcom embarked on a three-pronged strategy to embrace online gaming. “Each game had a different concept of how to utilise online connectivity: the racing game Auto Modellista, the horror spin-off Resident Evil: Outbreak and, finally, the multiplayer action game Monster Hunter,” explains Kaname Fujioka, who would go on to direct the latter. “So the series really came about from our early efforts to develop games in the nascent online space.”

Fujioka had joined Capcom in its arcade heyday when Street Fighter II was the king. As a character animator and motion designer, he cut his teeth in the company’s arcade division on titles like the Darkstalkers series before leading on character creation for lesser-known arcade-only release Red Earth. So an online-specific game, one set in a vast 3D world of roaming beasts, was