What Was It Like Working On Metal Gear Rising?

“We dragged the whole team from their beds, put them in a fighter jet while they were still half asleep… the next moment catapulted off the carrier and flying at top speed.”

That’s how PlatinumGames’ Atsushi Inaba describes the experience of working on Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance. While development on most games tends to be more relaxed at first and gets busiest toward the end of the schedule, this was not the case with Metal Gear Rising, Inaba says.

Kenji Saito, the game’s director, was especially taken aback when first Inaba broke the news to the development team that Platinum had been contracted to develop Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance.

“Kenji probably had a heart attack when I asked him, ‘Want to be the director? I need an answer right now,’” Inaba recalls in a blog post.

After breaking the news, Inaba then had another announcement for the devteam—that a brand new debut trailer for the game was to be shown at the 2011 Video Game Awards, and they needed to get cracking on it.

“I’ll never forget that moment,” Inaba writes. “You could cut the tension in the room with a knife. But of course, they can all look back now and appreciate that moment… no, probably not. I take that back.”