Luigi’s Mansion: Dark Moon devs on making a third-person action game
Luigi’s Mansion: Dark Moon was an interesting project for Next Level Games to tackle. It was the company’s first major game that was being developed in collaboration with Nintendo as an action title.
For supervisor Yoshihito Ikebata, while he didn’t have much experience with the genre, his desire to make a new Luigi’s Mansion motivated him to work on Dark Moon.
“How did that happen? I guess I just wanted to work on a game like that.
I guess the strongest element of me getting involved with this was just because I, personally, really wanted to see a sequel to “Luigi’s Mansion.” Now, of course, that was battling within me, against the anxiety that I felt about working on a kind of game that I hadn’t really had a lot of experience with before, but I would say that in the end, the desire to make a sequel to “Luigi’s Mansion” was the stronger feeling, and it won out.”
Director Bryce Holliday also weighed in on making a third-person action game and how Next Level Games has “kind of done slightly different games than Nintendo would make if they were using an internal team.”
“For Next Level Games, we had this long existing partnership with Nintendo, and we’ve kind of done slightly different games than Nintendo would make if they were using an internal team. “Mario Soccer” is a little more competitive and edgy than say their other sports titles. “Punch-Out” is really a North American classic game. I think they are hopefully using Next Level Games as a way of pushing themselves, or challenging themselves, to be a little bit different, and by giving us “Luigi’s Mansion 2,” it kind of allowed us to bring something to the table that they might not have had internally.
We’re big fans of the original GameCube game, and we were honored to be given this opportunity. We had a little bit of background with “Captain America” for Sega, which was a third-person action adventure game, but in terms of our Nintendo catalog, we hadn’t done a game like this. So we kind of used our experience at the company with other developers, plus our established relationship with them and their commitment to us pushing the envelope a bit, and it was a nice match for how “Luigi’s Mansion 2″ came about.”
