Danganronpa creator taking a “big gamble” on making a game he will actually own the rights to - AUTOMATON WEST
The creator of the Danganronpa series does not own rights to any of the games he has worked on, but aims to change that with his next title.
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Kazutaka Kodaka, the creator of the Danganronpa franchise and writer of Master Detective Archives: Rain Code, recently shared musings on his personal X (formerly Twitter) account about the latest title he is working on. Apparently, one of Kodaka’s goals with the project is to create a game that he will own full copyright to.
Post translation: I don’t hold any form of copyright to any of the games or original scenarios I have created so far. I get paid to work for as long as I’m under contract, and when the contract is over, I’m out of the picture. The pride and love I feel as a creator remain, and being able to create the games I want makes me happy. However, I want to make at least one game that I will properly hold the rights to. While this involves the gamble of funding production, I want to make a game I own the rights to as a culmination of my work.
The creator explains that his work so far has been transactional, leaving him with no form of rights over the scenarios he has written or titles he has been involved in so far. Kodaka was affiliated with Spike Chunsoft until 2017, and it seems that while he was given the freedom to create the games he wanted to, he was not left with anything officially to his name. Expanding on the topic, Kodaka quotes his post, mentioning his currently-in-progress game: “Therefore, the title I’m working on right now will be just that! It’s a big gamble, and there are lots and lots of difficulties related to funding and workload, but it’s shaping up to be a crazy (too crazy) good game, so please look forward to it!”
While evidently faced with some obstacles, the creator seems confident about the quality of his next work. The “too crazy” (too狂) Kodaka uses in the tweet is a reference to Too Kyoo Games, the studio he founded together with other former Spike Chunsoft employees back in 2017. This includes Zero Escape series creator Kotaro Uchukoshi and Danganronpa illustrator Rui Komatsuzaki.
Back in January this year, Kodaka had teased a “crazy” game he was working on obsessively without stopping, and his use of the hashtags #極限 (en: extreme) and #絶望 (en: despair) were taken as a sign that Kodaka he was talking about the Extreme x Despair collaboration project with Kotaro Uchikoshi that was initially announced back in 2018.
