NEWSWEEK: How did you become game designers? MIKAMI: I was baited. I went to a party at the Hilton Hotel, which was so gorgeous and I went because I could eat for free. It was 1989. I was in school at the time, majoring in product merchandising, but I didn’t study that hard–I was a typical Japanese student.

ITAGAKI: I wanted to become a novelist. I studied for that for a long time, but I gave up that dream. Still, I wanted to be on the side of creating something and sending a message.

MIZUGUCHI: I wanted to do something related to entertainment, but I didn’t find much possibility in film, television and movies–those media seemed old-fashioned. This sounds strange, but I felt that the possibilities for these media were already exhausted. When I joined Sega I said I had no interest in making games. I wanted to be in the entertainment business in a bigger sense, creating theme parks and attractions and I was placed in the amusement-park group.

How do the new game consoles that are being developed affect the process of making games? MIZUGUCHI: Our workload is truly increasing substantially. It takes more money, more time and more people than before. Everything is evolving too fast. The hardware improvements have been so fast that it is hard to keep up with them. It has only been five or six years since the production process has dramatically changed because of polygon-based graphics. I think it took them 100 years or so from the Wright brothers’ planes to jumbo jets, but the same thing happened for games in just five or 10 years.

ITAGAKI: I used to be a graphics programmer. When I entered this industry, I was frustrated how banal the graphics of the game machines looked. This continues to this day. I want even more powerful machines.

MIKAMI: Whether it’s PS2 or GameCube, it’s impossible for us to embody our images 100 percent. We are software creators, not hardware creators, so we have to adapt. Although we want to focus on creating games that users enjoy, we have to spend most of our energy overcoming the technological hurdles. As soon as we get used to one tool and we feel that we can use it to make great games, another comes out. Having a new platform is like replacing a black-and-white TV set with a color TV. I think games have been a drug that gives people pleasure. That’s why users constantly pursue new stimuli. But that has hit a ceiling, and I think we designers will have to shift to providing more purely design satisfaction.

Is the industry in a transition to online games? And how difficult would it be to make these games? MIKAMI: It would be hard because of politics. I don’t think it would be too hard to create games. We’ll have different forms of [transmission] pipes. But it takes a huge amount of investment to create and maintain the servers. No one company can afford all this.

ITAGAKI: Everybody knew that after [the advent of 3-D games], creators would be at a loss with what to do next. I am involved in fighting games, but I’m not interested in interactive fighting games. Among Internet users, players of fighting games make a very small community. Dealing with such a small community feels like a waste.

MIZUGUCHI: To be honest, I cannot come up with ideas for online games. I don’t think the time has come yet. When we think about playing on the Net, I’m most interested in cell phones for now. It’s much more interesting. The image quality is limited, but I feel like we could do something fun as a play tool. I see cell phones as game consoles like PS2, Nintendo, Dreamcast and Xbox.

Do you think that games themselves have improved in the past 10 years? MIKAMI: Game creation is evolving steadily. What’s changing is the way players enjoy games. Game players don’t want to experience anything hard. Particularly since PlayStation came out. What used to be mountain climbing, so to speak, has become merely hiking. Games used to be for hard-core gamers, but they have been lightened up so that more people can enjoy them.