Kazutaka Kodaka, creator of Danganronpa and The Hundred Line: Last Defense Academy, recently decided to do an “ask me anything” session on X, accepting any questions that aren’t directly related to his games The inquiries have varied from genuine life advice to questions about his favorite anime and even his deepest, darkest secrets.
One user asked for advice on how to turn their most ambitious and craziest ideas into actual products, especially while working under a company where such “incredibly unsafe” projects with low prospects for selling usually end up getting turned down.
As someone who initially went through a lot of struggles to bring his passion projects into fruition, Kodaka half-jokingly explains that the only way to achieve this is by “deceiving your company.” According to him, getting an original work greenlit can never happen if you just blindly obey what the company tells you. Even if it means having to “pretend to obey them,” it’s important to persevere in doing what you enjoy and what you actually want to do.
Post translation:
You’ve got to deceive the company.
Pursuing creative work while in a company is impossible if you’re someone who does whatever the company tells them. Even if it means that you have to pretend to obey, keep doing what you like. Use your company. And if something goes wrong, the one who hired you is to blame anyways lol.
Back when Kodaka was working under Spike, he actually had quite a difficult time trying to get the Danganronpa project kicked off. As he has revealed in an earlier YouTube interview, Danganronpa’s themes and niche genre were a big turn off for the company’s upper management, and the project faced rejection upon rejection.
“At the time, it was really hard to get the project greenlit. Since it was a game about making highschoolers kill each other, the upper management was like – It’s a game that promotes bullying and It’s probably not going to sell because of tough market competition. No matter how many times we tried pitching it at company meetings, it didn’t get approved,” Kodaka explained.
Apparently, Kodaka’s Danganronpa proposal was rejected multiple times, but a producer then advised him to go directly to the president of Spike and ask for permission. Kodaka says he was so sure that Danganronpa would turn into an interesting game, he was even ready to quit the company if the project didn’t get greenlit. Luckily, the company president was very casual about it, and immediately approved it.
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