Taken from the Japanese SEGA Saturn Magazine #67, the AM1 team share their development stories on the original House of the Dead arcade game while the Saturn version was in development. Today, we’re going to take a look at the character design concept by one of the designers of the game, Hiroyuki Taguchi.
*The magazine scans were translated with the use of Bing and Google Translate which may make a few sentences a bit broken.* Hit the jump to see how the characters developed for The House of the Dead.
“The first thing I want to show you about early CG is the image CG drawn in the early development. “I’m conscious of a sad player. The whole story was grimness from the beginning, so the image CG is getting darker as well, “says Mr. Taguchi, a designer. As it is said, the image of the work seems to have been decided from the beginning.
“The main character of the woman who is the charm of Shiv that is not seen in other games. The image had not changed since the early development. What bothers me is the existence of Sophie, who was originally named Carol. In fact, she was able to choose as a player character. Due to various circumstances, the plan came in, but it is interesting to see what kind of story it developed with her.” ~ Hiroyuki Taguchi
Tom Rogan
“Rogan was used to be a hot blooded character. Therefore, he was the first agent who takes is as his playable role. He loathes the DBR Corp.”
G
“G took the role as a 2P playable character. He seemed to be calm and cool, but something is that character going on.”
Mr. Happy
“Dr. Curien’s scrapped character. There is a memory that I was tossed because it has been seen as invisible man. I don’t know why the name is happy.”
Play Boy
“It is a scrapped character, but I do not remember whether it was an enemy or was an ally or what character. I think that it was a character which came out by talking that it was good if there was a cool super ability enemy.”
Carol (Sophie)
“At first, I was going to use it in the player character, but I stopped it by my arbitrary discretion. She is named Carol and emphasizes an intellectual atmosphere that is different from Sophie’s.”
Dr. Curien (Dr.A)
“His image has not changed much. The first setting was a person who had the most humane feeling. I did not know the spelling of the name, and I have written the name and DR.A.”
Next week, we’ll continue to take a look at the concepts behind the monsters in the game in Part 2.