Ashcraft and I trekked over to Sony Computer Entertainment to pick the brain of Tsutomu Kouno, senior designer of Loco Roco. After some wacky scheduling mix-up hijinks, we were escorted to the Yasuda building and led into our waiting area. We were then quickly booted out.

It wasn't that we'd pissed anyone off (that came later), we'd just walked in on someone else's interview and Sony PR seemed quite serious about keeping an eye on us. Probably a good idea as Ashcraft started snapping pics of the bathroom and scoping for top secret documents.

We were brought in to speak to Kouno after a short wait and served delicious iced coffee. Loco Roco programmer/swell fellow Gregg Tavares sat in with us and helped out with translation.

Finally getting down to it, I asked Kouno why he became a game designer and why he made Loco Roco. He told us, "In elementary school I did AI programming and then again in college. I always liked to snowboard and wanted to make a snowboarding game." Instead of doing dangerous tricks, he watched videos of snowboarders but wanted to speed up and slow down the action, as well as change the angle. Obviously this couldn't be done and it inspired the game design of Loco Roco.

Despite making such a hyper cute game, Kouno plays games for an adult taste. He likes Age of Empires, Monster Hunter, and, like everyone else in Japan loves Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest. He even plays first person shooters. When I asked him if he wanted to make the games he plays, he said no. Loco Roco was designed to target a worldwide audience.

Kouno told us that he designed the characters during his commute to work, sketching the cast on his PDA. These sketches even made it into the He played with art styles that looked like clay and paper, but due to time constraints had to settle on the simple flat visuals.

When asked about the questionably "racist" character designs for the game, he told us "I drew the moja because I thought it was cool. My favorite character was the black Loco Roco". He also told us some of his best friends were black. Kidding, he didn't say that, but it was obvious from the staff that there was no harm intended.

Then it got a little ugly.

I asked Kouno if he'd like to work on any other hardware — Wii, DS, or Xbox 360. Unfortunately, the Sony PR folks chimed in at this point, wondering what the hell kind of question that was. It was hypothetical, people! I was just looking to see if the man was inspired by the possibilities of the other systems unique hardware and software capabilities. Kouno politely declined to answer. "Well, what about new Sony hardware? Anything you'd like to do with the PSP accessories?" After I prodded him, he said he had no game designs yet that would take advantage of the GPS and camera attachments.

Sony PR asked me to stop at this point, but I had one more thing to ask.

"How do you feel about the PlayStation 3? Will you be working with it?"

He kept his mouth shut about the PS3, only mentioning that, yes, he'll be working on it. "I'll be focusing on the PSP. The DS is outselling the PSP in Japan and I want to make a game to change that. Maybe Loco Roco wasn't it, but I'll keep trying."

Dude, that's going to be way harder than pulling off some snowboarding tricks. Good luck! Michael McWhertor