"Five to six years is pretty normal for the development of a game... we did it in about three" Eiichiro Sasaki and Hiroyuki Kobayashi speak on how Stupid Never Dies was able to be developed relatively quickly
One specific title I’ve been keeping my eye on since its announcement is Stupid Never Dies. I previously saw developer GPTrack50’s upcoming debut game back in March through a hands-off preview, but got to try it for myself just recently right before Summer Game Fest started and got to chat with GPTrack50 Studio Head Hiroyuki Kobayashi, along with Stupid Never Dies Director Eiichiro Sasaki.
Previously, the only thing about GPTrack50 publicly revealed was Hiroyuki Kobayashi’s involvement in founding the studio, and his many years at Capcom previously has been echoed far and wide. Sasaki was also previously at Capcom, and some notable directorial roles under his belt are Zack & Wiki: Quest for Barbaros’ Treasure and Resident Evil 6.
Another striking GPTrack50 staff announcement in my meeting with them was that Genseki Tanaka is Stupid Never Dies’ Art Director. He was previously at Ubisoft, and served as an Assistant Art Director on Far Cry 3 and Far Cry 4. An intriguing statistic that was shared with me is that GPTrack50’s development team consists of roughly 30 people and out of that 30, about 70% used to work at Capcom, while the remaining 30% come from studios such as Konami, Square Enix, Ubisoft, and such.
They also revealed that Stupid Never Dies will be coming this fall, though its exact release date has yet to be announced.
Learn more about GPTrack50’s upcoming action RPG in my interview with Hiroyuki Kobayashi (Studio Head of GPTrack50) and Eiichiro Sasaki (Director of Stupid Never Dies) down below.
Eiichiro Sasaki (Director of Stupid Never Dies): We are taking a sigh of relief because the final tweaks have been finished, but now we have days of bug checks coming.
Hiroyuki Kobyashi (Studio Head of GPTrack50): Is there anything that’s easy? (laughs) From my perspective, it was pretty tough to get 30 people together to create the team. I thought that wouldn’t be too hard, and that ended up being pretty difficult actually.
Eiichiro Sasaki: This is not something that was easy necessarily but from my perspective, five to six years is pretty normal for the development of a game. We decided to take a speedier approach in the development, and we did it in about three years. I was like oh wow, this is possible. It doesn’t mean that it was easy but it was, you know, fortunate that was possible.
Eiichiro Sasaki: I would say that yes, it was partly the environment [of developing on Unreal Engine 5], but also having 30 people in the company. It’s a very small size, so each person was kind of a specialist in a different field and that really helped in speeding things up.
Eiichiro Sasaki: It’s a zombie underdog story, so we wanted to created a parallel word to match that. There’s all these familiar monsters and then within those familiar monsters, the lowest sort of “rank” is typically the zombie - who is the main character in Stupid Never Dies. That’s what we decided to revolve the story around.
Hiroyuki Kobayashi: We wanted to appeal to worldwide fans and to take these famous monsters known all over the world, but apply our original designs and looks to create them.
Eiichiro Sasaki: Thanks to the structure that you mentioned, there’s this sort of joy of experiencing the growth of the character that you get to experience many times. Usually in a RPG, you only experience this once over the course of 30 hours that you see these characters growing, which is great.
But for us, that timespan is very short - usually in these little 30-minute chunks, which is roughly how long each of these dungeon dives take. I wanted to have that sort of condensed and unique experience.
Eiichiro Sasaki: (smiles) Yes, there are some fun things in store.
Hiroyuki Kobayashi: The first thing I want fans to notice is the worldview. I just love zombies, but you’ll see a new kind of zombie that you’ve never seen before. As a game, the zombie grows in many different ways, and you get to choose whether you equip your zombie with a missile launcher or with a sword. And then, there’s also the aspect of the Style Eat which you don’t get to control because you don’t know which enemy is going to show up.
Therefore, it’s kind of this balance of aspects you can control and can’t control that make for a really fun balance in Stupid Never Dies.
Eiichiro Sasaki: For me, I just want to say that if you like action games, I would love for you to try Stupid Never Dies.
Hiroyuki Kobayashi: I usually have an iced coffee in the middle of the day.
Eiichiro Sasaki: I usually drink my coffee back but days like today when I’m tired, I take a cappuccino with caramel.