Platinum Games on Infinite Space’s biggest success and failure, which are one and the same

EDGE took a trip down memory lane with some of the staff at Platinum Games in its latest issue.

One of the games discussed was Infinite Space, the studio’s first and only handheld game.

While speaking about the title, Atsushi Inaba started out by jokingly commenting about how it was undershipped.

“The biggest problem with Infinite Space was when SEGA undershipped the game and it sold out instantly! We lost the chance for a bunch of sales!”

Again, Inaba was kind of joking here, but it is known that Infinite Space was far from a critical hit. It sold under 40,000 units in its first week in Japan, and it didn’t sell particularly well in North America.

Inaba continued talking about Infinite Space by explaining how the game’s continuous increase in development scope were both a success and a failure:

“Honestly, the reason that Infinite Space failed… It’s not right to say that it failed, because from another angle this is actually its greatest success: during production the scenario kept getting bigger and bigger, and so the ROM size started getting bigger, and the schedule got stretched as we added more and more. But in the end that’s what people loved about that game. So it’s difficult to separate the success and failure of that title, because they’re one and the same thing.”

Thanks to joclo for the tip.