Inafune on defeating Capcom's sequel-heavy budgeting
In one anecdote, former Capcom exec Keiji Inafune illustrates how he got so high up in the company and the kind of behavior that likely led to his hasty exit. During a presentation at Kyoto's Ritsumeikan University, the Neptunia Mk-II weapon dished on the corporate culture at Capcom, and how he gamed it to get Lost Planet and Dead Rising made.
Before those games, he said, Capcom had a rule requiring 70-80 percent of the games produced at the company to be sequels, and the management rejected pitches for new titles even beyond that proportion. Inafune started up two new projects, Lost Planet and Dead Rising, and just kept them going even after the prototypes were rejected.
Eventually, he exceeded the budget for Lost Planet's prototype by 400%, figuring that Capcom wouldn't cancel it if the game was half done. The strategy worked: both titles made it to retail, and started franchises that have sold over four million units each.
Inafune was already well known for a successful act of guerrilla game-making. After Mega Man, his team was famously only allowed to develop Mega Man 2 if they did so on their own time, without affecting the schedules of other projects.
