One crummy thing about living here in the good ol’ U.S. of A. is that we don’t get issues of Britain’s Edge Magazine for a full month after they hit stands in Britain. Yes, I know, it’s a hard life. We’ve been at war with two separate nations for close to a decade, the economy is disintegrating, and our health care system is an atrocity but all that pales in comparison to not getting pretty videogame rags in a timely manner. But I digress. Yesterday, while flipping through their July issue, something stuck out about their Platinum Games cover story: the photo spread of Atsushi Inaba, Hideki Kamiya, Shigenori Nishikawa, Hifumi Kouno, and Tatsuya Minami made them look like a god damn boy band.
I’m conflicted about the emerging designer-as-rockstar image. Once upon a time, it wasn’t unusual for a game to be made by a single person, but in 2008, it’s the rarest exception to the rule. Big games, the vast majority of games the public plays, are made by studios whose collective creative vision makes the game what it is, not one woman or man’s vision. Instead of celebrating and promoting the individual, the rockstar of David Jaffe, Cliffy B, or Shigeru Miyamoto, maybe it should be about the rock band image like in the Platinum Games spread. I’d wear a Valve t-shirt over a Gabe Newell one any day, wouldn’t you?
Related links:
Independent at a Price: Sega and Platinum Games
Clover Returns, Heavy as Platinum