Last month, long-time PlayStation exec Shuhei Yoshida departed Sony after about 30 years of service. His short-term future was revealed pretty much immediately – the voice of a green duck mascot who quite fancies opening a game center in upcoming indie Promise Mascot Agency. Though, as the game’s devs explained to me, those two things happening so close together wasn’t planned out in advance.
As part of a recent interview, I asked PMA’s devs – Paradise Killer studio Kaizen Game Works – how both Yoshida and Deadly Premonition designer Hidetaka ‘Swery’ Suehiro came to star in the open-world mascot management game they’re releasing later this year.
“We initially never thought we would do voice acting because of the cost and effort involved,” game director Oli Clarke Smith told me, “But then the people funding the game – Kowloon Nights – thought that it would be a big quality bump, and they were completely right. They pushed for it and so we said, ‘Okay, fine, let’s do it’. They said, what would be good is, because you’ve got all these mascots, it would be fun if we’ve got some games industry cameos in.
“So, we reached out to some people. Swery we approached because he liked our previous game Paradise Killer, and I think Deadly Premonition is a masterpiece, and so we wanted him. After Deadly Premonition came out, he did a bunch of things, but one the things he did was become ordained as a priest. One of our NPC mascots in the game that will help you and you do a side quest for is an ex-biker gang member that has turned into a priest, so we thought we should get Swery for him.
“Then, for Shuhei, we had a connection to him through Kowloon,” he continued, “They were chatting to him, and he really liked our game, and he’d seen it before. Then our Japanese localiser, he used to work with Shuhei at PlayStation on Jack and Daxter and Crash Bandicoot. So, when we were working together, we suggested reaching out to [Yoshida] and he’s like, ‘Oh, that’s my old boss, I’ll speak to him’.”
The devs reckon this speaking may have taken place at last year’s Tokyo Game Show – as good a place to speak to an exec about becoming a mascot as any. “Again, we had a good candidate mascot for him,” Clarke Smith explained, “one of the side quest mascots is MonouGe, who wants to open a game center because he loves old arcade games and we thought that was a good role for Shuhei. He said yes, and it just so happened that we announced our voice actors on the day that he left Sony. That was complete serendipity, and we hadn’t planned for it. So, we got a lot of buzz out of that.”
So, there you go. Sometimes life just does a thing, and a guy leaves a big console maker one day, only to be revealed as a green duck guy living in a cursed town before he’s proabably even eaten the last of his leaving party cake.
If you’re keen to find out more about Promise Mascot Agency, make sure to check out our fresh preview of it. I didn’t Yoshida or Swery’s characters in the bit I played, but there was plenty of other weirdness to go around the taste of mascot management.