Hifumi Kono memories of Clock Tower & Clock Tower 2 development from Nude Maker website The following brief passages were taken from the website of developer Hifumi Kono's company, the puzzlingly-titled "Nude Maker." (All right, Kono said in an AMA that the name's about "going back to that more natural spirit of being a creator" and making art without pretense.) Clock Tower http://www.nudemaker.jp/jp/product01.html The first original title we designed—a homage to the work of Dario Argento we so loved. We were repeatedly told during development that it was a bad idea to create a game where you could do nothing but run away from your surroundings. In order to create a certain mood and atmosphere in the rooms, the game makes rather extensive (or, to put it another way, ridiculous) use of its backgrounds for an SFC game of its time. Incidentally, the character graphics were made by photographing actual models and then capturing those images in a process known as CG creation. We used this process because we wanted to try our hand at digitization, which was in vogue at the time—not to mention because our development period had been shortened. At the time, digitization was cutting-edge technology! Jennifer's motion model was a woman who at the time was a colleague who worked in our planning division. When we told her about what we had in mind, on the very day of photography, the woman was wearing a white blouse and a navy skirt—and her look, just as it was, became Jennifer's outfit. (It would be unthinkable for this kind of thing to happen in game production today...) Incidentally, the model was a real trouper and really threw herself into her performance. She held up going through things like falling down in the corridor and dangling from this protrusion that was above the entrance to the building on the company roof, and most of it was more or less directly reproduced in-game. Clock Tower 2 http://www.nudemaker.jp/jp/product02.html The sequel to Clock Tower. We weren't very interested in creating a sequel, but the change in hardware combined with the use of 3D polygons, which symbolized cutting-edge technology at the time, won us over, and we took on the job. A little after the start of development, news of Biohazard began hitting magazines; we set a goal for ourselves of creating a horror title that could match the "wow" factor of those images, and "Down with Biohazard!" jokingly became our motto during our development. (...Please don't laugh. It may seem ridiculous, but it's good for people to set lofty goals for themselves.) To tell you the truth, the hardest part about the title was the choice of hardware. The Playstation and Saturn, which had just debuted at the time, were just about in a dead heat, and the N64 was just about to launch; we couldn't make any predictions at all about which platform would be victorious. The Saturn had Virtua Fighter, the title that could be called the standard-bearer of next-gen games; the N64 was coming off Nintendo's overwhelming supremacy in the SFC era, and it was said that it would instantly transform the hardware race once it launched. (I recall that you came across that sort of analysis frequently in the magazines of the day.) On the other hand, the PlayStation, of course, was a brand new entrant into the gaming industry; certain voices were loudly pointing out concerns over the console's future, and even though it was beating the Saturn to a degree at the time, this victory was treated as only temporary. After much fretting, I ultimately chose the PlayStation, which proved in the end to be the best choice, but...well, honestly, I can't say it was the result of any brilliant analysis; I guess it was more like a crazy, desperate long shot just happened to be right. Ultimately, making the correct choice led to a big boost in sales for the title. Incidentally, maybe it was because their release dates were close together, but almost all the stores near the company put together corner displays featuring both Clock Tower 2 and Enemy Zero, as if they were having a face-off. ************************* Translation by R. Capowski, RACapowski@sceneryrecalled.com, 2/13/15. Clock Tower is the propert of Capcom; this document is unaffiliated with Capcom, Nude Maker, or any other creators, regardless of their state of dress.