(Below is part of my latest GameFile column. For the full thing, check out MTVNews.com)
...He's not the kind of guy you'd expect to spend his morning in a really quiet place. But Tetsuya Mizuguchi had done just that before he sat down for his interview with GameFile early in the sunny Vegas afternoon. He had awoken at 5 a.m. and driven to Death Valley. He had gone there just to think.
"I was thinking about the future, life, being a human being," he said. "All that time, I wasn't thinking about the game."
He's not obsessed with games. Unlike some other game designers, he seems almost hesitant to talk about them. He said he spends his plane rides from his home base in Tokyo to the U.S. reading, not playing a PSP or DS.
But he does run a game company — Q Entertainment — and he does think about making games all the time — games like "Rez." And he dreams about them. "Sometimes I'm playing my games in my brain," he said. "Sometimes I have a vision, a very clear vision that 'this is going to be fun.' I wake up and take a memo. In the process of making 'Rez,' I had that kind of dream all the time."
He gave an example about how his dreams help shape his games. He cited a rhythm game he made in 1999. "When I was making 'Space Channel 5,' I played all the time in the studio. And in the night, I slept on the couch in the studio. I would play and play." He'd fall asleep and still be playing in his dreams. One night that happened and "suddenly I heard a voice when I made a mistake. [It said:] 'Hey, what are you doing?' It was different voices. But I thought, 'This must be fun.' Suddenly, I had the inspiration: 'Let's [base] this on a TV show.' " The "Space Channel 5" game went from a simple music game to one set in a space-age TV soundstage.