Oji Hiroi wrote the Tengai Makyo games, along with Gulliver Boy, then later went on to create Sakura Taisen.
This is from 2003, give or take a year. I translated about half of it. The English is a bit raw, but if you think it's interesting, let me know, and I'll take a crack at the other half later.
http://chibarei.blog.jp/gsl/words/kojimaxhiroi/kojimahiroi.html----------------------------------------------
Hiroi: Ah, the PC Engine. Those times were tough.
Kojima: They were? They were fun for me. (laughs) Let's hear about Tengai Makyo.
Hiroi: Sure. We decided this is what we would do, didn't we? (laughs)
Kojima: For me, Tengai Makyo was this really big presence. There was that first one on the PC Engine...I had just made Snatcher on PC88 at that time. I remember thinking "They got Ryuichi Sakamoto!! What the hell!?" I was just a director at the time, and I couldn't deal with money-matters. I tried to show people how much you were doing [so I could do the same], and they just thought I was an idiot. Then along came Tengai 2. That had amazing music.
Hiroi: Joe Hisaishi.
Kojima: You must have had a heck of a time, what with all the actors you used. They even broadcast that TV docu-drama "The Men Who Made Tengai Makyo".
Hiroi: I remember. Home console games on CD-ROM was a big topic at the time.
Kojima: The PC Engine CD system sold, what, a million units? And Tengai Makyo [2?] sold about 500,000?
Hiroi: No no, it wasn't that much. It was about 200,000.
Kojima: Oh, really? Well, I know it sold like crazy. Snatcher CD-ROMantic sold 100,000, and it was the #2 selling game.
Hiroi: Well, there were only a million units of hardware. 100,000 is great. That's a ten-percent share.
[Note: other sources say that by the end, there were almost two million CD-capable systems sold in Japan]
Kojima: That was the first time I ever received an award. I had never gotten a bonus before, and even though all I got was [$1000], I was really happy about it.
Hiroi: Yeah, when Tengai sold really well, Hudson gave me the red-carpet treatment. "Oh, Mr. Hiroi! Welcome!" I couldn't believe these were the same guys. I had been working freelance, and all I got per month was [$2000]. Then along came my contract royalties, and Hudson suddenly started granting my every wish. It was like the world changed. I felt like Cinderella. (laughs)
Kojima: Tengai had such long play-time, too. Mr. Iwasaki was programming it.
[Note: He also ported Ys.]
Hiroi: Ah, Iwasaki the Genius.
Kojima: He and I got along great. I got him to come on during the interview portion of the Policenauts trial version.
Hiroi: He was the one who kept the whole enterprise afloat. You'd ask someone else, and they'd say they couldn't do it, and then you'd ask him, and he'd say "Sure!" and get it done for you somehow. In those days, even with the CD-ROM, we had data-limit problems. We were trying to trying to do live data streaming, you see. We'd whip up some animations, but then realize that it wouldn't fit. Everything had to be broken down into 16 colors. So many things were difficult. We really wondered how the heck we were supposed to get it in those colors...that's what it was like back then.
Kojima: Well, Tengai did wind up with proper animation, didn't it? We were all so surprised. We felt like losers in comparison, too. It was sad. (laughs)
Hiroi: In those days, you developed the foundation along with the game. What I mean is, you developed the tools. You'd say what you want to do in front of a gathering of programmers and higher-ups, then talk about how to do it, and they'd say "We better make some tools."
Kojima: Tengai was the first game with talking characters, right?
Hiroi: Yes. For the most part, nobody had ever used a voice actor in a game before.
Kojima: That's right. And you got Ryuichi Sakamoto...I felt like you were on the cutting-edge of production. For me, it's you, Shigeru Miyamoto and Kenji Eno who loom largest. That's my big-three (laughs). People say this and that about Eno, but I like him as a person. Even setting aside the things he made, he really changed the gaming world. That's why he's in there for me.
Hiroi: It was a lot of fun, wasn't it? Mr. Eno and the rest of us, we all had so much energy. (laughs)
Kojima: You were involved in manga and toys, like Mashin Eiyuuden Wataru, right? You were able to launch from games into other spheres. I've always wanted to do that.
Hiroi: I did a lot of things, but I strongly feel that it was the gaming industry that saved me in the end. I used to wonder what in the world I was going to do with my life. That was when the gaming industry came in and said "We need weirdos just like you." I had never made a game before, but it was how I ate for three years. They gave me those royalties, too, saying I would get however much for however many sales. I came into this big chunk of money, and I started thinking, I'm actually worth this. I'm grateful to the game industry. Everyone was so young then. (laughs) Hudson was being led by a 28 year old, and they were all foolish. They'd throw this technology at us and tell us to do something cool with it. When I first came to Hudson, I asked them what 8-bit even meant. (laughs) They told me not to worry about learning all that junk, to leave it to them, and to focus on giving them a good story. They told me that they didn't want to rely on old manga, but rather make something new. Time isn't always kind to things that use cutting-edge technology. This is true for movies, too. But in those days, we felt like we
were the cutting-edge. We thought we were interesting, and it gave us a lot of energy.
Kojima: It was fun, wasn't it? Everyone had these broken dreams...I know I had unfulfilled dreams about being in movies, or being in a band. Manga, too. Everyone was like that. We wanted to make names for ourselves. We were ready to show everyone what we could do. We had nothing to lose.
Hiroi: Yep. I really felt like, if this doesn't work, that's it for me. I had tried my hand at anime, too, but it just wasn't for me. It was the gaming industry that felt like where I was supposed to be. I liked text-adventures. We used to translate D&D from English together. If you brought up the Lord of the Rings, people knew what you were talking about. I was so happy about that. We used to get all excited about simulations and things together.
Kojima: I had wanted to be in movies. I got into games in the 8-bit era, when the Famicom was big. Games had text, and the pictures didn't move. When things moved into the CD-ROM era, we could use human voices and [CD audio]. With the 3DO, we could play movies and show more motion. It was great.
Hiroi: It goes to show why they picked you for "10 people paving the way to the future"!
