From his early days at Sega to his current role as founder and CEO of Enhance Games through Q Entertainment, Mizuguchi has long pursued the convergence of emotions, games and technology. When the upcoming Lumines arises, he and his team bring their stunning musical puzzles to VR for the first time.
“When I first saw a video game, it was black and white,” Miyashita Aoki tells me with an associative smile. “It was Pon. I was 9 or 10 years old. My friend’s house was a toy store. It was a good friend.”
I have a video call with Mizuguchi to discuss Lumin’s development, but the conversation blooms quickly. From the experiences that inspired him to become a game developer and become the earliest era in the industry to his feelings about his current projects and virtual reality and the future, I walk along the throughline of his career, from Miyamura (or Miz, as I said I might call him). He continues to list games that have had a huge impact.
“I played Xenon 2, an amiga game by the Bitmap brothers,” he says. “It was a shooter and the music was amazing. I realized that this wasn’t made by a typical game developer. It was people who loved music, technology, new expressions, new media.”
“In school, I was studying the aesthetics of media, which means (mixed) of art, technology and the future of media,” he says. “I wanted to direct a music video. But when I graduated from college, there were already a lot of great music videos. So, ‘What’s next?’
Japanese arcades have a glimpse into the answer. The R360 of the Sega Am2, a giant ball-shaped cockpit arcade cabinet released in 1990, can rotate 360 degrees in any direction, allowing the internal players to move freely depending on in-game action. Featuring a 4-point safety harness, it was designed to rotate completely upside down, bringing an incredible immersion to Sega’s flight sim games. Miyai was impressed.
“It was a whole new experience. I’m a gamer and all of the coolest cabinets had the Sega logo, so I wanted to work for Sega. Already, I was able to see a future where virtual reality will be on a massive scale.”
The theme appears as he speaks. It’s all about technology and emotions. He was drawn to arcade cabinets that pushed the boundaries of sensory stimuli, people at the forefront of experimental gaming experiences, and games that stretched the arcade cabinets. It’s all connected.
In 2001, his colleagues at Mizuguchi and Sega produced Lesz, an empathetic musical rail shooter, which Miz describes as “the kind of experience of being here.”
Rez’s ambitious blend of sounds, visuals and gameplay, as well as its unusually presented themes and stories, plunges into the digital world for hackers to acquire hard cells on their millennium turns. It has become a beloved classic, but Rez was underrated at launch, but there was no doubt that it was delayed in its release on the unfortunate native console, The Sega Dreamcast.
Rez gameplay clips played on Sega Dreamcast and captured by uploadVr
“I remember people saying that lesbians are ahead of their time,” Mizuguchi says. “It’s true that Rez is not a commercially successful game. It sought deep immersion from the players. It was not just visually, but emotionally abstract. There weren’t many games made at the time.
Miyai’s answer was Lumines, a game he wanted to take the empathetic sensibilities that he grew on Rez and introduced them in a more familiar form.
In Lamin, 2×2 blocks made of different patterns and colors go down from top to bottom, while the sequencer lines erase matching colors. Sweeps become music time and when you place blocks, your actions will move in time with the music you are listening (and help).
Released in 2004, Lumines arrived alongside Sony’s PSP handheld console, becoming the first style of a clear sync game style, selling over a million copies. Over 20 years later, Lumines will occur, and we will no longer recreate our original experiences or take advantage of nostalgia (although we do it on our own if social media is an indicator), but we will use new technology to extend the original idea in a meaningful way.
When I come to the PS5 and PC and come to the VR headset for the first time in the series, I intend to amplify the emotional impact of the original. Like Mizuguchi’s previous rethinking of Rez and Tetris (he produced the 2018 hugely successful musical puzzle tetris effect), Lumines may be the closest to his original vision.
“It was just like lesbians,” he says. “We wanted to revisit lesbians and take it to a whole new level. How can we bring new experiences to make you feel? For us, experience is king, synesthesia is queen. Well. It means feelings, or how you share emotionally touching experiences. And it lives on top of what we do. ”
“It’s a portal,” he says. “Our hope is that when you play or experience our games, we discover your own emotions and experiences. Whether it’s through rhythms and vibrations, whether you have this euphoric moment or not, our hope is that not just how much fun you are, it has more meaning to it.”
Lumines Arise is heading for PlayStation VR2 and PC VR on November 11th. Enhance does not rule out anything for releases on additional platforms. “Our hope is what we can do, as you have seen in other games in our game!”
