{"id":34714,"date":"2018-07-22T04:15:00","date_gmt":"2018-07-22T04:15:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.nintendolife.com\/news\/2018\/07\/head_of_mercurysteam_believes_nintendo_and_konami_resurrected_spanish_studio"},"modified":"2018-07-22T04:15:00","modified_gmt":"2018-07-22T04:15:00","slug":"head-of-mercurysteam-believes-nintendo-and-konami-resurrected-spanish-studio","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/2018\/07\/22\/head-of-mercurysteam-believes-nintendo-and-konami-resurrected-spanish-studio\/","title":{"rendered":"Head Of MercurySteam Believes Nintendo And Konami Resurrected Spanish Studio"},"content":{"rendered":"<div class=\"media_block\"><a href=\"http:\/\/images.nintendolife.com\/news\/2018\/07\/head_of_mercurysteam_believes_nintendo_and_konami_resurrected_spanish_studio\/large.jpg\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/images.nintendolife.com\/news\/2018\/07\/head_of_mercurysteam_believes_nintendo_and_konami_resurrected_spanish_studio\/small.jpg\" class=\"media_thumbnail\"><\/a><\/div>\n<aside class=\"picture embed centered picture-900x img-900x\">\n<div class=\"img\"><a title=\"Samus Firing Shots.jpg\" href=\"http:\/\/images.nintendolife.com\/news\/2018\/07\/head_of_mecurysteam_believes_nintendo_and_konami_resurrected_spanish_studio\/attachment\/0\/large.jpg\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/images.nintendolife.com\/news\/2018\/07\/head_of_mecurysteam_believes_nintendo_and_konami_resurrected_spanish_studio\/attachment\/0\/900x.jpg\" alt=\"Samus Firing Shots.jpg\" \/><\/a><\/div>\n<\/aside>\n<p>Spanish-based studio, MercurySteam, is best known for developing <a class=\"external\" href=\"http:\/\/www.nintendolife.com\/games\/3ds\/metroid_samus_returns\"><strong>Metroid: Samus Returns<\/strong><\/a> and also working on Konami&#8217;s\u00a0<strong>Castlevania<\/strong> series &#8211; including the 3DS entry, <a class=\"external\" href=\"http:\/\/www.nintendolife.com\/games\/3ds\/castlevania_lords_of_shadow_mirror_of_fate\"><strong>Lords of Shadow \u2013 Mirror of Fate<\/strong><\/a>. Although the studio\u2019s history has been well <a class=\"external\" href=\"http:\/\/www.nintendolife.com\/news\/2017\/09\/nintendo_made_us_a_better_developer_says_metroid_samus_returns_studio_mercurysteam\">documented<\/a> in the past, during an <a class=\"external\" href=\"https:\/\/www.dualshockers.com\/mercurysteam-interview-saved-nintendo\/\">interview<\/a> earlier this week, MercurySteam boss\u00a0Enric \u00c1lvarez shared his side of the story, explaining how the company was essentially saved by a chain of fortunate events:<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>Back in 2005 when we were about to disappear, and we created a small demo, based on a moment from The Exorcist \u2013 the movie. Back in the days, the Epic people were showing off their new Gears of War game, and we saw a few pics from a monster and we thought, \u201chey we can do that as well, let\u2019s do it\u201d and we produced a quite impressive visual test.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<blockquote><\/blockquote>\n<p>This led to the studio\u00a0working with Codemasters, helping to develop\u00a0<strong>Clive Barker&#8217;s Jericho<\/strong>, and eventually working with Konami and Nintendo:<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>The result was so impressive, that I still remember, Codemasters told us, don\u2019t show it to anyone else, and come here, and come with a PC because we don\u2019t believe this is real. That very day we saved the studio. We also went [and] visited Konami, and that day we met with Dave Cox, and we felt an immediate connection between us. A few years later, Dave Cox himself called us and told us \u201chey guys do you want to reboot Castlevania?\u201d and that is how it all started.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<blockquote>\n<p>And then, this has been explained many times by Nintendo people &#8230; how they got interested &#8211; we collaborated with them doing Metroid: Samus Returns. In short, it was because of Castlevania: Mirror of Fate. [Nintendo] liked it and they thought we were up to the task of doing what we did, and the rest is history.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<blockquote><\/blockquote>\n<p>When asked about the differences between Japanese and Western publishers,\u00a0Enric \u00c1lvarez made the following observation:<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>Especially with Nintendo, the biggest difference is all they care about is quality. All they care about is polish. All they care about is giving satisfaction to their players. The rest is secondary. You can\u2019t find this working for a western publisher because there\u2019s always time constraints, there\u2019s always a lot of pressure. There\u2019s also pressure working in any environment, especially when we\u2019re talking about massive amounts of money &#8211; they\u2019re always somewhat very worried about that money, which is normal and fair.\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<blockquote>\n<p>But I think that the biggest difference we\u2019ve found is in our direction. It\u2019s not saying there\u2019s no pressure involved in both sides, but the pressure from a publisher, from a Japanese publisher comes from that aspect &#8211; quality. And the pressure in our experience, I can\u2019t talk any other experiences, just in our experience &#8211; the pressure coming from a western publisher comes from many other directions.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<blockquote><\/blockquote>\n<p>As for what the future holds for MecurySteam, half the studio is currently focused on <strong>Spacelords<\/strong> (formerly known as <strong>Raiders of the Broken Planet<\/strong>), and the other half is assigned to providing more stable revenue through partnerships with major publishers and the handling of big-name IP. Enric also said Spacelords would be a great fit for the Switch library, but due to the small-sized and self-financed team, the studio didn&#8217;t have the capacity to include it in development. Though, it was still open to the idea of a possible port in the future.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n<p><em>Did you play Samus Returns or Castlevania: Lords of Shadow \u2013 Mirror of Fate on the 3DS? Do you agree Japanese publishers care more about the quality of their games? Would you like to see MercurySteam bring its latest project to the Switch? Tell us below.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Spanish-based studio, MercurySteam, is best known for developing Metroid: Samus Returns and also working on Konami&#8217;s\u00a0Castlevania series &#8211; including the 3DS entry, Lords of Shadow \u2013 Mirror of Fate. Although the studio\u2019s history has been well documented in the past, during an interview earlier this week, MercurySteam boss\u00a0Enric \u00c1lvarez shared his side of the story, [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-34714","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-nintendo-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34714","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=34714"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34714\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=34714"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=34714"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=34714"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}