Judd and Plenty: An Interview With Capcom's Ben Judd

A Tokyo sit-down with Mr. Bionic Commando himself, Producer Ben Judd.
11/5/2008 6:59 PM | 5 Comments | Page 3 of 4

Judd: Well, it was my first project, so I was pretty green. Ultimately, I didn't know a lot about what I was doing. Again I got into trouble for being too honest [with the press], specifically about the game's price point. I was pricing it too cheap [Editor's note: $10 on Xbox Live Arcade and PlayStation Network; some thought the game should have been priced at $15.] and I had already announced it on our podcast, so going back and changing it would have caused bad PR. The company allowed the price point to go forward, but I probably should have had more conversations about that internally before going forward publically. They easily could have fired me for that.

Crispy Gamer: Instead, they just sent you to the Capcom torture basement?

Judd: Well, I'm already in the salary torture basement.

Crispy Gamer: With the next-gen version of the game due out early next year, you've been working on Bionic Commando for, what, three years? You must be completely Bionic Commando-ed out, no?

Judd: [Laughs] Man, you want to get jaded about something you love, try working on it for three years straight, working from 8 am to 2 am every night. I love pizza, cookies and cream ice cream, and sex. [Editor's note: Hopefully not necessarily all at once, Ben.] If I did any of them for that many hours during the day, I would hate them.

Crispy Gamer: The sex you would still love. But things would get sore.

Judd: Exactly.

Crispy Gamer: What did you do to keep it fresh, to keep yourself from burning out?

Judd: It's tough. Sometimes I want to go running from the office and curl into a ball, and weep. It's just so much hard, hard work, and you feel like you're the only one going through it. And to make things worse, I always feel like I'm the meat in a Japanese-company and Western-buyer sandwich. But the thing that has kept me solid was when we announced the new games, and the community site went crazy. There's so much passion there. In the end, the one thing that really pulls me back is the fans. I'm working myself into oblivion, and not making great money. But seeing how much the fans love the games is what it's all about. For all the crap that games get for being too violent, they obviously bring so much joy to people. So if my hard work can make people a little happier, even for a minute, then it's worth it.

Crispy Gamer: You started out in a small town in Ohio, and here we are sitting here, on a balcony in a Tokyo hotel, getting massages from geishas and drinking $400 bottles of champagne. [Editor's note: Those last two details are pure fiction.] How do you go from that humble beginning to where you are now?

Judd: I got very lucky. I started with a short-term goal; it started in college, really. I wanted to learn Japanese. I liked Japanese, but I wasn't sure how I was going to make that into a career. I thought, OK, so let's move to Japan. And I still didn't know what I would do to make a living -- be an ambassador, maybe? I had no clue. I tried the videogame industry, and got hired at Capcom as a marketing specialist. Then I decided that I wanted to try the production side, and here I am. I've just gotten very lucky that those little mini-goals have led to something bigger.