CCC’s Patrick Evans and Ryan Schultz take a few minutes to talk to EA Chicago General Manager Kudo Tsunoda

To hear the guys over at EA Chicago talk about next-gen gaming, you get the impression that they are sorely disappointed with a huge majority of games out so far. After looking at the wildly-ambitious Def Jam: Icon and talking to General Manager and Def Jam: Icon Executive Producer Kudo Tsunoda, it’s easy to see why they would have that opinion.

Dressed in big red rock-star-style sunglasses and wearing a casual Old Navy-style sweater, Kudo talks big about his studio’s part in the future of gaming. “We’re all about not only trying to make games for the next gen consoles but figure out ways to create a new next-gen gameplay experience,” Tsunoda explains as we sit in their first-floor offices, away from the bustling party atmosphere outside. “We don’t want to only use the technology to improve the graphics. As a developer, we want to figure out new ways for people to play games.”

Def Jam: Icon is the embodiment of Kudo’s position in terms of gameplay innovation and driving players to play differently. Def Jam: Icon places gamers in a world that literally marches to the beat of a different drum. Every stage bounces wildly depending on the song that is playing in the background. This mechanic is not only aesthetic but it also directly affects the fight. As the song continues, hazards throughout the stage are moving in time with the hip-hop beats, allowing players to use their knowledge of both the stage and the song to their advantage.

“We had three big design goals in starting up Def Jam: Icon. The first was infusing the hip-hop lifestyle elements into the game. If you look at other games out there, they have run-of-the-mill gameplay mechanics with an artist like 50 Cent on the cover and all of a sudden it’s a hip-hop lifestyle game. None of those products really had anything to do with hip-hop lifestyle affecting the gameplay. We wanted all of our core gameplay mechanics to be driven by hip-hop lifestyle elements.”

As innovation is one of their key goals in producing a next-gen title, Tsunoda and company would look to how the fighting genre works for their next goal. “The fighting genre has just been stagnant for the last ten years. It’s the same gameplay over and over again. You have two characters run into the middle of a lifeless arena and hit the strike or attack button as fast as you can. Every once in a while you get weapons or other additions, but there isn’t anything really that innovative. We wanted to change the way fighting games played by changing the environment from a lifeless stage to making it a third character in the fight. How you and your opponent interact with the environment will dictate in a big way who wins or loses the fight.”

Developing a game like Icon takes two things according to Kudo; hard work from an incredibly talented development crew and boatloads of inspiration both inside and outside the office. One obvious inspiration for the new Def Jam would be the vast Def Jam roster of artists and performers and the music that they have produced. When you look at some of the exaggerated visuals, especially the high-rise background that constantly moves during the demo fight, you can sense a molding of artistic graffiti and music video extravagance. Another less-obvious muse Kudo credits for his studio’s work is the city of Chicago and their experiences downtown.

“The city of Chicago, as much if not more than any other city, is such a stimulus-rich environment. I’m a firm believer in getting people developing a game into as stimulus-rich an environment as possible, and Chicago is just awesome for that. There’s also a great hip-hop scene here in Chicago and a lot of the really good artists are based in the area. A lot of the artists in the game are willing to come here and hang out our studios because they like Chicago and really get into the game. They give us advice and hints on making the game more authentic. Besides, there is such a rich hip-hop environment in this city, and that’s just a huge bonus when developing a game like this.”

Tsunoda is a self-proclaimed believer in the “method-acting” school of game development. In the same way that, for instance, the developers at Konami go through a short special-ops training session to develop the Metal Gear Solid franchise, the developers at EA Chicago plop themselves dead-center in the material that their game is centered around. For Fight Night 3, Kudo and crew learned how to box themselves in order to develop the most accurate experience possible. For a game that’s steeped in a lifestyle instead of one particular action or sport like boxing, you simply have to go outside and experience that environment. “Immersing yourself in the material as much as possible just leads to a huge well of ideas that you can draw on to deliver true gameplay innovation in the product you’re making,” Kudo adds.

As a couple of born-and-raised Chicago locals, we were very pleased to hear Kudo muse about the same exact things that we have affirmed makes our hometown great. “What I like most about Chicago is that it is a bustling, busy downtown that just hits you. It has a dense, rich center-city area. Los Angeles has a great hip-hop scene obviously, doesn’t have such a centralized urban area and it’s more spread out. The thing I love most about Chicago that if you walk ten minutes in any direction from this building, you’re going to see something really cool. That’s the great thing about being here; there really are few places in the world that have such a densely stacked area of people, art, and other stimuli. New York would be one of those other densely-populated areas, but it’s such a struggle to get from point A to point B and everything is a fight. I grew up in New York and I love that place, but Chicago is just such an easy-access city to fun and anything else you want.”

To paint a picture of Chicago for those who have never been, imagine a city where you can walk four blocks from the center of downtown and find yourself in one of the many ethnic neighborhoods like “Greek-town.” EA Chicago’s office, which is located no more than ten minutes by foot from the Loop, is housed in a five- or six-story flat-styled building. Unlike many of the offices we’ve visited out on the West Coast, EA Chicago has a posh atmosphere about it, complete with an elevator lit with a single blue bulb. On our way to their offices from the Metra train on Michigan Avenue, we ran across two street performers, three homeless people, and restaurant after restaurant on just about every block.

After all our gushing for the Second City and stories of weird religious fanatic sightings, the games of the future are what are important. “I think that if you add something to a game, such as the great Def Jam soundtrack in Icon, it has to enhance the gameplay of the game overall. Sure, you can play your own soundtrack in any game on Xbox 360 for instance, but if you are racing to the sounds of Ludacris or T.I., it’s nothing more than background noise.” Anything else would simply be current-gen according to Tsunoda.

“That’s the third point that we wanted to address in developing Def Jam: Icon. We wanted to push the level of next-generation of next-gen art. This might be a bit of the pissy artist/developer in me, but I honestly feel that if all a developer is striving for in a next-generation game is photo-realistic graphics than they have failed. Sure, we went for photo-realism in Fight Night 3 and we are trying to push the graphics in Icon, but the experience isn’t truly next-gen. To me, what’s really going to make the next-gen consoles kick ass is when developers start looking at photo-realism not as the end goal, but as the base or starting point. Once you get the photo-realism, you want to trick it out or stylize it really pay off the content of the game you’re trying to deliver. Just look at a movie like Frank Miller’s Sin City. Sure, they had real actors, but they stylized the entire feel of the movie to portray a certain mood and environment. That’s the kind of thing that we are striving for with our future games out of EA Chicago.”

Kudo Tsunoda may have some big words in speaking about the EA Chicago version of the next generation of gameplay, but he is also leading by example. Even in its pre-Alpha build, Def Jam: Icon had all in attendance oooh-ing and aaah-ing during the demo and play time. We can’t wait to return to the Chicago offices to check up on the game in the near future and chat with the guys again.