Wesley Yin-Poole
Guest
In a surprise turn, a follow-up to 2006 PlayStation 2 game Okami was announced at The Game Awards 2024. A year after his split from PlatinumGames, series creator Hideki Kamiya now heads the newly founded studio Clovers and is workiing on Okami 2 as its director. IGN Japan spoke with Kamiya and Clovers President and CEO Kento Koyama to hear all about about how the company came to be and more.
IGN: Tell us about the founding of Clovers.
Kamiya: I left my former company, PlatinumGames, on October 12, 2023. There were all kinds of restrictions placed on me for the following year, which meant that I couldn't create games [as reported by IGN in a previous interview]. Now that the year has passed, I have finally been appointed as the studio head of Clovers. I'll be developing games at this new company with Koyama as president and CEO.
Koyama: Kamiya was under a year-long non-compete agreement. We wanted to have a clean slate when making games, even at Clovers, so we waited until this restriction was over and Kamiya had entered the company before officially going active.
Kamiya: I was genuinely unemployed between quitting PlatinumGames and joining Clovers. But once Clovers was formed and before I could announce anything, I decided to quietly add a "?" to the "Unemployed" description on my X account's display name!
Koyama: I wonder if anyone truly noticed, haha.
Kamiya: It seems like a number of X users actually did. They were speculating that I'd be starting something new. I really was unemployed around the time of Tokyo Game Show 2024, so I wasn't lying when I added "unemployed" to my username at the time!
IGN: How many people are working at Clovers at the moment?
Koyama: About 20 people.
Kamiya: The company has bases in Tokyo and Osaka. People from those two cities came to Clovers, and so we started locations in both at the same time. We began in small rental offices, but now they're so full that they can't even fit everyone. We're now working on moving to real offices. The move to the Osaka office is scheduled for February 2025, while the Tokyo office move is slated for spring 2025.
Koyama: We're thinking of adding new employees together with these moves.
Kamiya: We already have people who say they would like to work at Clovers, so we need to put a system in place to hire some of them. We imagine that hiring is going to become even more active now that we’ve officially announced Clovers’ foundation [in fact, a guide to career applications is now available on the official Clovers website]. The vision that Koyama and I have in mind is to aim for the company to grow to around 70 people in the future.
IGN: Please tell us about what kind of work this new studio will undertake, and what you hope to do in the future.
Koyama: We're currently focusing on developing a contracted title for a publisher (the sequel to Okami). We'll be focusing on that one for a while, but we'd like to create our own IP at Clovers in the future. That isn't to say that making IP is a top priority of ours, though. What's important is bringing players the most interesting and fun titles that we can.
Kamiya: Our strength at Clovers is that we're a group with a unique sense of creativity. I've never been too fixated on creating only original properties, even when I was at PlatinumGames. When I was there, the company also developed IP belonging to other companies, like Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance. [Kamiya was not directly involved in developing this game.] Whether it's an existing IP or a new one, our mission at Clovers is to create unique games that only we can make.
IGN: Recently there are quite a few Japanese companies that have been funded by overseas publishers, but has Clovers taken on any investments?
Koyama: We haven't received any outside investment at the moment. That was a decision we've made.
Kamiya: We were fortunate enough to receive a number of offers, but right now we'd like to see just how far we can go on our own. We want to maintain the freedom to do whatever we want. It is true that it's harder to keep the lights on without taking on investors, but we're doing our best at Clovers to preserve our independence as a studio.
IGN: Mr Koyama, please tell us about your history in the game industry.
Koyama: I got my start in the game industry at a company called Mario Club [a subsidiary of Nintendo that conducts debugging and more]. I worked there as a debugger, but I never gave up on my dream of being a game designer. I then moved to DeNA where I got to fulfill that dream. After that, I became involved in a smartphone title at PlatinumGames.
Kamiya: Koyama was making the predecessor of what would become World of Demons, released on Apple Arcade. It was being developed as a live service game at first, but changed direction mid-development.
Koyama: I left PlatinumGames once World of Demons was no longer going to be a live service game. After that, I was in charge of the games division at the Kyoto office of a company called Donuts, but after a while there, someone I knew from PlatinumGames contacted me. When we met, they said, "You once mentioned that you wanted to work together with Hideki Kamiya, right?"
Kamiya: I never had the chance to work with Koyama during his first time at PlatinumGames. But the mere sight of how he worked and the quality of his work did impress me. I kept on thinking what a pity it was that he left the company, so when the time came when I wanted to ask for Koyama's help, I had a mutual acquaintance reach out to him.
Koyama: Through that connection, I returned to PlatinumGames and ended up working under Kamiya for the next three years.
IGN: What did you think when you heard that Mr Kamiya would be leaving PlatinumGames?
Koyama: I felt that his leaving was a loss for the game industry. Had his games not been fun, perhaps I wouldn’t have thought about it. We can look back on it and laugh now, but at the time, Kamiya looked unusually serious.
Kamiya: It's not as if I was feeling sad about my own future. I felt bad for the company's staff I would be leaving behind by exiting the company and my team, and by leaving my positions as game director and vice president. This may sound conceited, but I was in a position where I shouldered quite a lot at PlatinumGames. From my perspective, I left the company based on my own convictions as a creator, but I'm sure that others also saw it as a selfish act. I felt very sorry about that.
Koyama: Kamiya didn't have any plans at all following his departure from PlatinumGames. He was saying things like, "Maybe I'll go back to my family's home and wipe down the floors there." So I said, "If you ever want to make another game, please contact me. I come from a farming family, so let's make games in your free time outside of planting and harvesting rice. I might not be able to pay you a salary, but I can at least send you some rice!"
Kamiya: I was happy when Koyama told me he'd send me rice. I mean, I was thinking, "How could there possibly be a company that'd take in an industry troublemaker who's constantly spewing venom on X like me?" But maybe this unemployable guy would still be able to make ends meet if Koyama sent me rice. Of course, it wasn't rice he ended up making for me, but rather a company!
How could there possibly be a company that'd take in an industry troublemaker who's constantly spewing venom on X like me?
IGN: Mr Koyama, will you mainly be working as a manager as the CEO of Clovers, or will you still be involved in game development?
Koyama: Yes, I will be working as the company's president, but I'll continue to be a game designer as well. While I am new to being a company president, I feel like I've been able to do a good job thanks to the help of the other members of the company around me.
Kamiya: I don't know what I'd do without Koyama's ability to handle that kind of work. I'm clueless when it comes to the management side, so my primary job will be creating games. I'm able to let him handle the parts of running a business that I'm not capable of doing myself. I've never once felt concerned. I'm very grateful to have someone like him with talents that even stretch outside of game development. I'd like to rely on him as the company's president, and I also highly value his abilities as a creator, so I have high hopes for his future as a game designer.
IGN: Your studio's name, Clovers, brings to mind Clover Studio, which was responsible for the original Okami and other titles and where Kmaiya used to work. Can you tell us how you decided on this name?
Koyama: As I mentioned earlier, I come from a family of farmers, so I first thought about a company name that had to do with agriculture. It seemed that Kamiya had some concerns about my ability to come up with a good name, though.
Kamiya: His sense for names is rather unique, you see... That's when I proposed that we name the company Clovers.
Koyama: We ended up going with his very first suggestion as-is. At first, I couldn’t help but be reminded of Clover Studio, which Kamiya was previously a part of. We were going out of our way to create a new company, so I was reluctant to have a company name that looked back to the past.
Kamiya: I may have some fond feelings for Clover Studio because of titles like Okami, but Koyama doesn’t have that history.
Koyama: I was able to empathize with Kamiya's explanation for the name, though. If you break down the name Clovers you get “C” and “lovers." The C in Clovers stands in part for “creativity," something that all of us love. Also, when thinking about the company's philosophy, in reference to a four-leaf clover, we began to talk about being a group with four guiding Cs, as in "C-lovers." Our company's logo is four interconnected Cs in the shape of a clover, as I think you can tell by looking at it.
Kamiya: We decided on three of the four Cs right away: Challenge, Creativity and Craftsmanship.
Kamiya: While things went smoothly up to here, we had trouble figuring out the fourth and last C. Too many positive words that begin with the letter C, so we didn't know which to pick. That's when Koyama had the idea, "How about we don't decide on the fourth C, and leave it up to each of our new members to decide what the final C means to them personally?"
Koyama: That's why we share three of the Cs as a company, while the fourth is thought up by each of our employees when they join the company, and we have them write down their reasons. Clovers now has a system where new hires choose their own fourth C the day they join the company. [The fourth C is also discussed in this way on Clovers’ website.]
IGN: What words did the two of you choose for that fourth C?
Kamiya: I've made my fourth C "Curiosity." It's always been what has driven me forward in my game design.
Koyama: I made my fourth C "Cleanness," to show my desire to always be sincere in my work and towards business partners. Within the company, you have everything from people who make their fourth C "Century," striving to create titles that will last for a hundred years, to stylish types who made theirs "Coffee Break."
Kamiya: By having everyone choose their own fourth C, it makes them even more aware of themselves as creators. I think Clovers is a good name for the company we want to become, as it stands for our desire to be a group that loves that fourth C.
IGN: Resident Evil creator Shinji Mikami often talks about wanting to focus on helping young talent to bloom. Mr Kamiya, as someone who came up under Mikami, how do you feel about that idea?
Kamiya: I was able to work as a director for the first time on Resident Evil 2 thanks to Mr Mikami's guidance. The offer shocked me because it was only my second year after joining Capcom, but within a fraction of a second I told him I'd do it. There's no question that I've also inherited what you might call this kind of "Mikami-ism," and at PlatinumGames I'd actively give direction work to promising young employees even if they didn't have experience as a director. That's why I'd like to continue to give opportunities to young talent at Clovers.
IGN: Your new website mentions that you are recruiting, but what kind of staff are you looking for?
Koyama: We believe that people who can relate to our three Cs – Challenge, Creativity and Craftsmanship – will be a good fit for Clovers.
Kamiya: I think that things like taking on a challenge, being creative or having a craftsmanlike mentality are not things you only do because you're told to do them. I feel that people who naturally have that kind of mindset and passion for creativity are the ones who fit in with us. In fact, the members who have joined Clovers so far are exactly like that. I hope to maintain that concentration and expand it even further.
I can't do anything alone. We have team members who draw artwork, others who turn it into 3D models, or who add movement, or who add sound and music, and people who program and finalize the output. Thanks to this combination of people, a game can grow into a wonderful work that exceeds my imagination; miracles are born, and players can enjoy the end result. Just like with game development, as we start a company from scratch this time, I really feel the importance of people's support. The current staff also came to Clovers without knowing what would happen, and I am so grateful to them for that. I wanted to leave that feeling of gratitude in a tangible form, so we took a group photo of all the Clovers staff. It was a sobering feeling once again. I'm sure they are not without anxiety, but they seem to be enjoying the process of building something from scratch, and that makes me feel really confident. I would be happy to create something with people who can enjoy taking on this challenge together.
This interview was conducted by Daniel Robson, Chief Editor of IGN Japan, and the article was written by Ryuchi Kataoka, a freelance writer for IGN Japan. It was translated by Ko Ransom.
Wesley is the UK News Editor for IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at [email protected] or confidentially at [email protected].
IGN: Tell us about the founding of Clovers.
Kamiya: I left my former company, PlatinumGames, on October 12, 2023. There were all kinds of restrictions placed on me for the following year, which meant that I couldn't create games [as reported by IGN in a previous interview]. Now that the year has passed, I have finally been appointed as the studio head of Clovers. I'll be developing games at this new company with Koyama as president and CEO.
Koyama: Kamiya was under a year-long non-compete agreement. We wanted to have a clean slate when making games, even at Clovers, so we waited until this restriction was over and Kamiya had entered the company before officially going active.
Kamiya: I was genuinely unemployed between quitting PlatinumGames and joining Clovers. But once Clovers was formed and before I could announce anything, I decided to quietly add a "?" to the "Unemployed" description on my X account's display name!
Koyama: I wonder if anyone truly noticed, haha.
Kamiya: It seems like a number of X users actually did. They were speculating that I'd be starting something new. I really was unemployed around the time of Tokyo Game Show 2024, so I wasn't lying when I added "unemployed" to my username at the time!
IGN: How many people are working at Clovers at the moment?
Koyama: About 20 people.
Kamiya: The company has bases in Tokyo and Osaka. People from those two cities came to Clovers, and so we started locations in both at the same time. We began in small rental offices, but now they're so full that they can't even fit everyone. We're now working on moving to real offices. The move to the Osaka office is scheduled for February 2025, while the Tokyo office move is slated for spring 2025.
Koyama: We're thinking of adding new employees together with these moves.
Kamiya: We already have people who say they would like to work at Clovers, so we need to put a system in place to hire some of them. We imagine that hiring is going to become even more active now that we’ve officially announced Clovers’ foundation [in fact, a guide to career applications is now available on the official Clovers website]. The vision that Koyama and I have in mind is to aim for the company to grow to around 70 people in the future.
IGN: Please tell us about what kind of work this new studio will undertake, and what you hope to do in the future.
Koyama: We're currently focusing on developing a contracted title for a publisher (the sequel to Okami). We'll be focusing on that one for a while, but we'd like to create our own IP at Clovers in the future. That isn't to say that making IP is a top priority of ours, though. What's important is bringing players the most interesting and fun titles that we can.
Kamiya: Our strength at Clovers is that we're a group with a unique sense of creativity. I've never been too fixated on creating only original properties, even when I was at PlatinumGames. When I was there, the company also developed IP belonging to other companies, like Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance. [Kamiya was not directly involved in developing this game.] Whether it's an existing IP or a new one, our mission at Clovers is to create unique games that only we can make.
IGN: Recently there are quite a few Japanese companies that have been funded by overseas publishers, but has Clovers taken on any investments?
Koyama: We haven't received any outside investment at the moment. That was a decision we've made.
Kamiya: We were fortunate enough to receive a number of offers, but right now we'd like to see just how far we can go on our own. We want to maintain the freedom to do whatever we want. It is true that it's harder to keep the lights on without taking on investors, but we're doing our best at Clovers to preserve our independence as a studio.
IGN: Mr Koyama, please tell us about your history in the game industry.
Koyama: I got my start in the game industry at a company called Mario Club [a subsidiary of Nintendo that conducts debugging and more]. I worked there as a debugger, but I never gave up on my dream of being a game designer. I then moved to DeNA where I got to fulfill that dream. After that, I became involved in a smartphone title at PlatinumGames.
Kamiya: Koyama was making the predecessor of what would become World of Demons, released on Apple Arcade. It was being developed as a live service game at first, but changed direction mid-development.
Koyama: I left PlatinumGames once World of Demons was no longer going to be a live service game. After that, I was in charge of the games division at the Kyoto office of a company called Donuts, but after a while there, someone I knew from PlatinumGames contacted me. When we met, they said, "You once mentioned that you wanted to work together with Hideki Kamiya, right?"
Kamiya: I never had the chance to work with Koyama during his first time at PlatinumGames. But the mere sight of how he worked and the quality of his work did impress me. I kept on thinking what a pity it was that he left the company, so when the time came when I wanted to ask for Koyama's help, I had a mutual acquaintance reach out to him.
Koyama: Through that connection, I returned to PlatinumGames and ended up working under Kamiya for the next three years.
IGN: What did you think when you heard that Mr Kamiya would be leaving PlatinumGames?
Koyama: I felt that his leaving was a loss for the game industry. Had his games not been fun, perhaps I wouldn’t have thought about it. We can look back on it and laugh now, but at the time, Kamiya looked unusually serious.
Kamiya: It's not as if I was feeling sad about my own future. I felt bad for the company's staff I would be leaving behind by exiting the company and my team, and by leaving my positions as game director and vice president. This may sound conceited, but I was in a position where I shouldered quite a lot at PlatinumGames. From my perspective, I left the company based on my own convictions as a creator, but I'm sure that others also saw it as a selfish act. I felt very sorry about that.
Koyama: Kamiya didn't have any plans at all following his departure from PlatinumGames. He was saying things like, "Maybe I'll go back to my family's home and wipe down the floors there." So I said, "If you ever want to make another game, please contact me. I come from a farming family, so let's make games in your free time outside of planting and harvesting rice. I might not be able to pay you a salary, but I can at least send you some rice!"
Kamiya: I was happy when Koyama told me he'd send me rice. I mean, I was thinking, "How could there possibly be a company that'd take in an industry troublemaker who's constantly spewing venom on X like me?" But maybe this unemployable guy would still be able to make ends meet if Koyama sent me rice. Of course, it wasn't rice he ended up making for me, but rather a company!
How could there possibly be a company that'd take in an industry troublemaker who's constantly spewing venom on X like me?
IGN: Mr Koyama, will you mainly be working as a manager as the CEO of Clovers, or will you still be involved in game development?
Koyama: Yes, I will be working as the company's president, but I'll continue to be a game designer as well. While I am new to being a company president, I feel like I've been able to do a good job thanks to the help of the other members of the company around me.
Kamiya: I don't know what I'd do without Koyama's ability to handle that kind of work. I'm clueless when it comes to the management side, so my primary job will be creating games. I'm able to let him handle the parts of running a business that I'm not capable of doing myself. I've never once felt concerned. I'm very grateful to have someone like him with talents that even stretch outside of game development. I'd like to rely on him as the company's president, and I also highly value his abilities as a creator, so I have high hopes for his future as a game designer.
IGN: Your studio's name, Clovers, brings to mind Clover Studio, which was responsible for the original Okami and other titles and where Kmaiya used to work. Can you tell us how you decided on this name?
Koyama: As I mentioned earlier, I come from a family of farmers, so I first thought about a company name that had to do with agriculture. It seemed that Kamiya had some concerns about my ability to come up with a good name, though.
Kamiya: His sense for names is rather unique, you see... That's when I proposed that we name the company Clovers.
Koyama: We ended up going with his very first suggestion as-is. At first, I couldn’t help but be reminded of Clover Studio, which Kamiya was previously a part of. We were going out of our way to create a new company, so I was reluctant to have a company name that looked back to the past.
Kamiya: I may have some fond feelings for Clover Studio because of titles like Okami, but Koyama doesn’t have that history.
Koyama: I was able to empathize with Kamiya's explanation for the name, though. If you break down the name Clovers you get “C” and “lovers." The C in Clovers stands in part for “creativity," something that all of us love. Also, when thinking about the company's philosophy, in reference to a four-leaf clover, we began to talk about being a group with four guiding Cs, as in "C-lovers." Our company's logo is four interconnected Cs in the shape of a clover, as I think you can tell by looking at it.
Kamiya: We decided on three of the four Cs right away: Challenge, Creativity and Craftsmanship.
Kamiya: While things went smoothly up to here, we had trouble figuring out the fourth and last C. Too many positive words that begin with the letter C, so we didn't know which to pick. That's when Koyama had the idea, "How about we don't decide on the fourth C, and leave it up to each of our new members to decide what the final C means to them personally?"
Koyama: That's why we share three of the Cs as a company, while the fourth is thought up by each of our employees when they join the company, and we have them write down their reasons. Clovers now has a system where new hires choose their own fourth C the day they join the company. [The fourth C is also discussed in this way on Clovers’ website.]
IGN: What words did the two of you choose for that fourth C?
Kamiya: I've made my fourth C "Curiosity." It's always been what has driven me forward in my game design.
Koyama: I made my fourth C "Cleanness," to show my desire to always be sincere in my work and towards business partners. Within the company, you have everything from people who make their fourth C "Century," striving to create titles that will last for a hundred years, to stylish types who made theirs "Coffee Break."
Kamiya: By having everyone choose their own fourth C, it makes them even more aware of themselves as creators. I think Clovers is a good name for the company we want to become, as it stands for our desire to be a group that loves that fourth C.
IGN: Resident Evil creator Shinji Mikami often talks about wanting to focus on helping young talent to bloom. Mr Kamiya, as someone who came up under Mikami, how do you feel about that idea?
Kamiya: I was able to work as a director for the first time on Resident Evil 2 thanks to Mr Mikami's guidance. The offer shocked me because it was only my second year after joining Capcom, but within a fraction of a second I told him I'd do it. There's no question that I've also inherited what you might call this kind of "Mikami-ism," and at PlatinumGames I'd actively give direction work to promising young employees even if they didn't have experience as a director. That's why I'd like to continue to give opportunities to young talent at Clovers.
IGN: Your new website mentions that you are recruiting, but what kind of staff are you looking for?
Koyama: We believe that people who can relate to our three Cs – Challenge, Creativity and Craftsmanship – will be a good fit for Clovers.
Kamiya: I think that things like taking on a challenge, being creative or having a craftsmanlike mentality are not things you only do because you're told to do them. I feel that people who naturally have that kind of mindset and passion for creativity are the ones who fit in with us. In fact, the members who have joined Clovers so far are exactly like that. I hope to maintain that concentration and expand it even further.
I can't do anything alone. We have team members who draw artwork, others who turn it into 3D models, or who add movement, or who add sound and music, and people who program and finalize the output. Thanks to this combination of people, a game can grow into a wonderful work that exceeds my imagination; miracles are born, and players can enjoy the end result. Just like with game development, as we start a company from scratch this time, I really feel the importance of people's support. The current staff also came to Clovers without knowing what would happen, and I am so grateful to them for that. I wanted to leave that feeling of gratitude in a tangible form, so we took a group photo of all the Clovers staff. It was a sobering feeling once again. I'm sure they are not without anxiety, but they seem to be enjoying the process of building something from scratch, and that makes me feel really confident. I would be happy to create something with people who can enjoy taking on this challenge together.
This interview was conducted by Daniel Robson, Chief Editor of IGN Japan, and the article was written by Ryuchi Kataoka, a freelance writer for IGN Japan. It was translated by Ko Ransom.
Wesley is the UK News Editor for IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at [email protected] or confidentially at [email protected].