How Shadows of the Damned Came to Be

Shadows of the Damned, the latest from Grasshopper Manufacture and the newly-independent Shinji Mikami, is finally just about complete. It's due out for the PS3 and 360 on June 21, and the way that Mikami and Grasshopper head Goichi Suda put it to Famitsu magazine this week, it's a miracle that it ever happened.

The Damned project got its start in 2007, not long after Suda and Mikami (who was still with Capcom back then) collaborated on Killer7 on the GameCube. "In 2007 I got a Hollywood agency to sign on to the project, and I figured that was our big chance, so I called up Mikami and we went around the US doing presentations with me as director and Mikami as producer," Suda said. "Several companies displayed interest, but out of them, EA was the most interested in what we were doing," Mikami added. "They were the first one to take real action, in other words."

The game they had at the time, called Kurayami (or "darkness" in Japanese), was a bit of a different game -- one where your gun had a monitor showing a girl that matured and revealed the story as you went through the game. "At the start of development," Suda recalled, "Kurayami was largely concentrated around hand-to-hand combat. However, Mikami talked things over with EA and we decided to introduce guns into the mix as well. I wrote up the story to go along with that, and just as we were just about done with the game, EA was all 'Wait a second!'"

QLOGIC PROGRESS SOFTWARE PLANAR SYSTEMS PEROT SYSTEMS PALM