Steel Battalion: Heavy Armor interview: War as celebration of life

Steel Battalion was released for the original Xbox console. The game put the player into the cockpit of a giant fighting robot. And it shipped with a massive controller with dozens of buttons and knobs. The total price was over $200 US. Gobsmacking.

Capcom had no intention of making a direct sequel and releasing a new, $200 controller for the Xbox 360, and thereby pricing the game beyond the reach of the ordinary consumer. So the franchise got shelved alongside the Japanese publisher's many other idle game concepts, waiting for an idea and a producer that would bring it back to relevance.

Enter: Project Natal and Tatsuya Kitabayashi.

Natal was the codename for Microsoft's Kinect, before it was Kinect. As part of its pre-development, Microsoft toured the technology around the world, visiting game publishers and developers, selling them on the concept, and looking for new game ideas. When Microsoft visited Capcom, Kitabayashi says "ideas flashed."

"We said: 'This is it!'" he tells me, through his interpreter. "Of anything we could make for Kinect, it's going to be a sequel for Steel Battalion."

Years later, Steel Battalion: Heavy Armor is finally ready to be shown, and journalists attending Capcom's 2012 Captivate event in Rome are gleefully lining up to drive a heavy Virtual Tank across alternate-history versions of a World War II-era battlefield using a combination of the Xbox 360 gamepad and simple, Kinect-enabled motion controls.

Kitabayashi hopes that once gamers get their hands on the game, they will once again be gobsmacked.

Capcom's unwillingness to release a new controller alongside a new Steel Battalion game necessarily altered the formula. Whereas Steel Battalion was as much about the controller and the Virtual Tank it drove as anything else, Heavy Armor would have to be something new. It would have to draw the player past the novelty of driving a massive, robotic tank, and into an experience that could stand on its own.

"It's boring if you're just replacing the controller," says Kitabayashi. "Where Steel Battalion was almost a simulator - you got into your VT and the fun of the game was in starting up the engine, starting up the machine, and moving it - in Heavy Armor it's a tool for immersion into the battlefield itself rather than being fixated on the VT."

For Kitabayashi, immersing the player in the battlefield means more than creating jarring camera cuts and loud explosions. It means exposing the player to the realities of war in the guise of play. A concept he calls "un-reality."

"A normal person living in a modern peaceful world would not experience a real war," he says. "So although I am pursuing reality in my games, the whole concept is unreal. It's the sense of bringing something that isn't real into your life, which, in turn, makes it fun. And I think that's what drives me in creating games.

"Until now games were less active because you'd see things happening on screen and interact by pressing buttons ... but in the end you basically triggered these actions and you watched the results happen in front of you. That's the repetition of modern games. But with Steel Battalion: Heavy Armor using Kinect, it's one step further into actual interaction because you've actually got to do these actions. If something happens, if somebody's falling, you've got to grab their hand. You've got to move your body to grab and I think it takes you that much closer to actual experience that I'm pursuing."

I ask Kitabayashi if the ability to create un-reality through a player's direct actions can create the possibility for making a player do things he or she didn't intend. If it's possible, in other words, to abuse this power over what happens when a player acts.

"As creators, the closer the experience we provide gets to the real perception of the world for that player, the more that we will need to think further in terms of what it is that we want to tell them," he says. "So if it's a baseball game, sure, you swing a bat and you hit the ball, but is that it? Or is there more meaning in swinging the bat?

"I think giving meaning to these actions is obviously a responsible thing, and in games like Steel Battalion: Heavy Armor [when] something has happened, we've really got to make sure that we're one hundred percent focused and straightforward in asserting what it is that we mean by making you do this action. Obviously we could be making people do things without them knowing."