Splatterhouse (2010) concept art Bandai Namco “I learned a lot from I wouldn’t wish on anybody else,” says Russell Schiffer, Namco Bandai’s senior director of technology, laughing as he speaks.
The circumstances were as messy as the blood-soaked game. In retrospect, the casualties of Splatterhouse were significant: wasted development funds, a shuttered third-party studio and a newly opened first-party team - which then closed when Splatterhouse shipped. What came next involved finding an American development studio with a penchant for brawlers, a choice that would eventually haunt Namco Bandai. “We sought similar success by using a well-known franchise. “Resident Evil was a big success by Capcom,” says Iwai. Since it was a brutal, M-rated franchise and Namco Bandai owned the IP, the publisher’s American branch was enthusiastic. Taking advantage of the slasher genre’s popularity, the game featured a Jason Voorhees-like masked hero named Rick splattering a variety of ghoulish creatures in a crude beat-’em-up. And then there was Splatterhouse.Ī late-’80s gore-fest, the Splatterhouse series originally flickered to life in arcades. It tried a gravity shifting shooter called Inversion. It tried the mythological adventure Enslaved. It tried a reboot of in-house action series Dead to Rights. It tried a game based on the American anime series Afro Samurai. Violent, edgy, Western-focused games like Grand Theft Auto were taking off, and Namco Bandai wanted a piece of that success. The company had a stable of legacy franchises like Ridge Racer and Tekken from its studios in Japan, but the Western market was growing. Iwai, a Sony veteran, says his mission was clear: to find a local hit for the new generation. In 2005, Xbox 360 was new to stores, PlayStation 3 was around the corner, media giants Namco and Bandai had just merged, and Makoto Iwai took a job as a senior vice president at Namco Bandai’s newly joined U.S.
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