Keiji Inafune is worried that you might think that Capcom doesn't want to work with Western game developers anymore, that the studio that made Mega Man, Street Fighter and Resident Evil would happily just back games made in Japan.
Well, technically we had heard that the company that backed the Western-developed original game Dark Void last year just doesn't want Western developers working with them on anything other than sequels. But let's not worry about such specifics, not when the request is so joyfully put.
At E3 last week, I had asked Inafune if Capcom was backing away from working with developers in America and Europe. Inafune's answer made his translator chuckle.
In the spirit of HIdeo Kojima making his very own plea to Kotaku, here is Capcom's Keiji Inafune, inventor of Mega Man, honcho of Dead Rising 2 (made in Canada!) and other cool Capcom games with a request, made through a translator to me in Los Angeles last week:
Kotaku, I need you guys to be the defenders. Because there are other people in the company that say things like we're not going to work with the West or Capcom is kind of going through some growing pains and we're going to tone it down. Every time you hear that, you should tell them, they are wrong. And so please don't post anything like that, because every time, it creates more headaches for me. We will work with the West. This is a policy that will not change.
And any time anybody — I don't care if they're above me, below me or me — says that, they are wrong.
We are working with the West, because there is a lot that we get from it. It's becoming more and more a western market so we need to learn how to collaborate more with Western developers if we are going to be able to stick around as a company.
After Inafune made that request, I requested that he pose for a picture somewhere cool. As you can see, he obliged.