Feature: 'Silence Is Golden: Takayoshi Sato's Occidental Journey'

In today's main Gamasutra feature, Brandon Sheffield talks to Takayoshi Sato, now working in California at Electronic Arts, but perhaps best known for creating the groundbreaking Silent Hill CG sequences for Konami single-handed and contributing significantly to Silent Hill 2's look, and discusses Sato's fascinating career and the differences between Japanese and Western game development. In this part of the interview, Sato explains how he stepped up from art conversion duties on Sexy Parodius to completing all of the pre-rendered sequences on Silent Hill entirely on his own: "At first, the work they gave me was much more basic, like making letters for subtitles, or UI for presentations, and scheduling, and sorting files. That sort of job. It was hard. And there were artists that were older than me, but didn't have any knowledge of 3D. But in Japanese society, older people get more respect within the company. So I had to teach them, while doing this work. So basically, I was doing demos and presentations in 3D, and not getting credit. I thought that was unfair, but I was paying my dues. So I decided to compose my own four-second piece of a movie, and then presented it. I kind of stepped over my boss, and showed the higher-ups, saying “This is what I can do. Let me do some real 3D work, otherwise I won’t teach anyone else.” So that’s how I started gradually getting 3D work, like rigging, lighting and atmosphere, character design, and other things on the visual pipeline. More than 8 months later, we had a chance to show our movies, and in-game stuff at E3. And at that point, I got applause." You can now read the full Gamasutra feature on the subject (no registration required, please feel free to link to the article from external websites).