Clover's Inaba Talks Personal History, Capcom Difficulties

In an exclusive interview with Gamasutra, Atsushi Inaba, head of the now dissolved Clover Studio (Okami, God Hand), has talked candidly about life both inside and out of his former employer Capcom, including the difficulties of producing some of the company's more original and risky titles. Speaking specifically about the struggle to get Gameboy Advance and DS legal adventure Gyakuten Saiban (Phoenix Wright) and mega-peripheral enhanced mech combat game Steel Battalion produced, Inaba said: "The business side would usually tell me to stop, and they wanted me to shut down the team, or they’d say ‘why are you using this staff, use that staff!’ There were very few people who said ‘oh, go ahead, you can do it!’ in the case of games like Steel Battalion." In the end, Inaba added, he "made a presentation and basically said, if we don’t do this now, we’ll never be able to put something like this out. It’s a once in a lifetime opportunity, and we wanted to be able to create something that had never been seen before." "So it was kind of like rallying the troops around the idea," he continued, "and getting people into the idea of doing this project that couldn’t be done by anyone else. But naturally the bookkeeping people were still saying ‘Stop!’" More on the studio head's experience previous to Capcom and the foundation of Clover can be seen in the full Gamasutra interview.