Founded in 1988, Arc System Works (or ArcSys for short) is the game developer/publisher behind many iconic anime fighting games such as BlazBlue, Dragonball FighterZ, and Guilty Gear—including Most recent play surpassed 2.5 million players. And leading ArcSys since day one has been founder, president and CEO: Minoru Kidooka. Present at EVO 2023 to celebrate ArcSys’ 35th anniversary and talk about the company’s latest announcements, Kidooka also took time to chat with ANN about ArcSys’ latest series of updates.
The following interview features the indispensable assistance of translator Yuji Moriya (who is cosplaying as Venom from Guilty Gear during the interview).
Image courtesy of the Guilty Gear-Strive-PR team
Anime News Network: Can you tell us about yourself?
Minoru KIDOOKA: Hello. My name is Kidooka from Arc System Works. Nice to meet you.
Recently Guilty Gear-Strive-surpassed 2.5 million players. Can you tell us more about that?
KIDOOKA: Guilty Gear-Strive-launched two years ago and in that time, 2.5 million units had been sold. So it’s amazing to think that there are 2.5 million players worldwide within two years. And I’m so grateful for everyone’s support in our game. And a lot has happened throughout these years, but we’re excited to be back in this post-COVID space. This was our second visit to EVO after the COVID shutdown. But I’m really excited to be back with the community and we’re having a lot of fun.
Do you plan to continue to prioritize development for Guilty Gear-Strive-?
KIDOOKA: Yeah, sure. You know, there are 2.5 million players worldwide, but we intend to expand that player base even further. And we want to support the game for the long term and keep our players playing for as long as possible. So we do our best to continue expanding and developing the game.
Will there be a similar development priority for the new UNI game [Under Night In-Birth II [Sys:Celes]]Are not?
KIDOOKA: Well, with Under Night, you know, the game was on a bit of a hiatus, but now that it’s coming out next year, we plan to support the game long term. And just like we did with Guilty Gear, we wanted to grow the game as much as possible.
What inspired Arc System Works to return to UNI?
KIDOOKA: Since the release and success of Under Night — the first Under Night — we actually had plans in place to create a sequel. It’s just that due to different circumstances, it takes a bit of time; It took a little while for us to execute that plan. But now, we are collaborating, working closely with French Bread to make that happen. And it’s something we’ve wanted to do for a long time.
A demo for the new UNI is available at EVO. How does it feel watching people play it?
KIDOOKA: We know that there is a large Under Night fan base in the United States. So with the Under Night 2 demo, we were extremely grateful to see so many people come out and try out the game. That said, we want to make sure that Under Night 2 returns next year as a competing title for EVO. To do that, we have to release it next year and come back. So we will do our best to make it happen and return to EVO with UNI 2 next year.
Oh, that would be interesting. So this year is also the anniversary year of Arc System Works; you have a new UNI game coming soon and Guilty Gear season 3 is also on the way. What else do you see in the future for Arc System Works?
KIDOOKA: I can’t say anything specific about the games. But as we said before, Guilty Gear and Under Night, we’re going to continue to provide long-term support to stay with the fans long-term but also create new games and deliver new games. That’s our life; It’s our way. It’s what we do as a company. So we want to continue to develop new and existing IPs like Double Dragon, River City Ransom—we want to support those games as well. Games outside the fighting game genre. So we want to continuously challenge ourselves to create exciting new IPs for our fans. We want to continue to do that going forward.
Do you have any other closing thoughts? Anything else you want to say?
KIDOOKA: We’re at EVO and I see so many people coming to this event and I’m really inspired by the energy that everyone brings to the community and this event. And in terms of Guilty Gear, we had a lot of participants—a lot of contestants on Guilty Gear. So that’s very, very exciting.
And with the support of outside companies like French Bed and Cygames, who develop Granblue, I think our mission is to bring excitement to the fighting game community and bring back the energy and hype. crowd. We are delighted to be here and hope everyone enjoys the event.
