“Love for Japan has always been an important factor in my life,” says Nicolas Doucet, the Frenchman with an unusual background who heads the Japanese studio behind the video game “Astro Bot,” available Friday on PlayStation 5.
In a large open space at the Tokyo headquarters of Sony Interactive Entertainment, between a ping-pong table and a few beanbags and sofas, sits a large television in front of which his entire team meets every two weeks to test the latest advances in the game.
“Playing together is important to maintain team cohesion,” stressed the 46-year-old Frenchman, during a visit organized at the end of August for several media outlets including AFP.
Team Asobi, his studio, spent three years on Astro Bot, a 3D platform game featuring new adventures of his little robot, the Frenchman says with passion. To better bring his game to life, he combines action with words, imitating the sound of an erupting volcano or mimicking a horse galloping.
The word “magic” comes up again and again in the creator’s mouth when he presents the universe that takes Astro from planet to planet: “It comes from the games I grew up with,” smiles Nicolas Doucet.
– “Contaminated” in Gers –
Originally from Aignan, “a small village” in Gers, in the heart of the Armagnac vineyards (south-west), he says he was immersed in Japanese pop culture from a very early age, like many others of “this generation of French people who grew up with the Club Dorothée”.
There was in the village “a gamer who imported his consoles and who infected us all. We were 14 years old, we played games entirely in Japanese, we didn’t understand anything, but we had them one or two years in advance. It crystallized in us this love of Japan”, he says.
Wanting to become first
An English teacher, he went into exile in London where he stumbled into the world of video games, working at Eidos, Electronic Arts and Lego, then at Sony to work with the EyeToy, a camera that allows you to play games using motion recognition.
“I’ve always been immersed in super accessible toy games where people have fun,” he says. Then, in the early 2010s, he asked to join Sony’s Japanese headquarters, “a childhood dream come true.”
His team was initially tasked with exploring the playful applications of various technologies, notably creating “Astro Bot Rescue Mission” for the PlayStation VR virtual reality headset.
At the end of 2020, the PlayStation 5 was released, which came pre-installed with “Astro’s PlayRoom”, designed to take full advantage of the capabilities of its controller.
“Astro Bot” is intended to be an extension of these first adventures, at a higher speed: without respite, Astro runs, flies, swims, skates, climbs, drills, wrings himself out like a sponge or transforms into a mouse across some fifty planets in sweet hues.
– “Hands in the grease” –
The game uses technology to enhance immersion with the “haptic feedback” present in the controller, a technology also used in smartphones, allowing the player to “feel” whether the character is walking in the grass, on a rocky path or on a metal surface.
Astro Bot also multiplies the winks to other PlayStation games, from “God of War” to “Uncharted” or “Horizon” in preparation for the thirtieth anniversary at the end of the year of the console, and while rumors circulate about the upcoming announcement of a “PS5 Pro” with improved performance.
Team Asobi’s workforce has nearly doubled in four years but remains deliberately tight “to ensure that each person works on the game directly,” Doucet emphasizes. “We really want to get our hands dirty.”
Neither a classic Japanese structure nor a Western-style team, the studio has members of 16 nationalities, bringing together “the best of both worlds”, according to Doucet, who says he admires the “precision” of the finish of Japanese developers.
“Making a platform game in Japan really makes sense, because it’s a country where historically the quality, the precision of the controls has always been at the top, in arcade or fighting games for example.”
“I have a lot of respect for the team members who have that in their blood,” he says. “Sometimes I think, ‘You’re really lucky to be able to do that.'”
mac/ep/ib
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