THE MAKING OF Mr DRILLER

With budgets in the tens of millions of dollars, 100-plussized teams and three-to-five-year development cycles on today’s biggest videogames, it takes a brave company to start work on an idea without careful planning, market assessment and prototyping in advance of full development. Yet great games are occasionally developed in secret, built up to a certain level before they’re shown to the managers of a studio for approval… games that might not sound much fun from a mere description, but turn out to be supremely playable once you get your hands on them. It’s a fact that we’re sure Hideo Yoshizawa would agree with, after the team behind 1997’s Klonoa surprised him with an idea involving falling blocks of dirt and a little guy with a drill while he was still working at Namco (he left to go freelance in 2016).

“It’s not a rare occasion to unofficially start making a game with an instinctively thought-up idea and using a programmer that isn’t busy,” he admits. “I was actually the manager at that time and, when I was walking through Namco’s offices,, but I soon became addicted to it – and the next minute I realised that I had already been playing for three hours. I became very excited and told the creator how brilliant the idea was, and decided to produce it.”