Which platform would you most like to explore at the moment?
PS3.

Why is that?
I think that PS3 has a very high potential to appeal to the market still, even if not so much is real now.

Does it have that potential that because of the way that Sony markets it, or because of its technology?
Maybe both – political things, marketing things, Sony as an institution - various kinds of things influencing each other so it’s very complicated to say. Maybe I think that very few people – maybe I want to be in that group – but very few people can do good creation for PS3. I think, for example, that Flower is a very good example. It requires a very high level of knowledge, experience and ambition to work on, so perhaps these kind of things are required for PlayStation.

Do you think Sony as a platform holder is particularly responsive to interesting ideas like those in Flower, or those in Parappa The Rapper in 1996?
Well Sony has very huge marketing power but even then it is struggling with its conservativeness. This kind of conservativeness shuts the possibility for PS3 so I’m really worrying about the fact that if a company like Sony is not aggressive in the industry it’s very bad for the unique creator, like [Flower creator] Jenova Chen or me.

Obviously your last game, Major Minor, came out on Wii. What did it mean to create a game for a Nintendo platform?
With Major Minor one big thing for me was using younger talent in the production, who developed their own ideas and discovered things by themselves. So I’m getting into a little more of a director position, watching their activities. That’s a big challenge for me!

Stepping away?
Yeah. But I have to, because if I tried to control directly all the small things, it’s impossible to handle several projects simultaneously. So I have to tell the younger people to make their own progress, especially on the music, for example.

Were you pleased with Major Minor?
Yeah, yeah, yeah. It is a big challenge that we did for the first time new things for the game, so that is a very big step.

As a musician, how important you think it is for games to have interactive music in them?
That’s a broad question, but from the moment electronic composing became possible, music got a certain beat – duh, duh, duh, duh. Everybody has to quit that kind of music because it’s just the result of the interaction with a tool. I mean the music is a tool to communicate with others, but currently much interactive music is just the result of communicating with the computer. This paradigm is very bad for the musician. So I have to say to the musician, “Think about your music as a tool to communicate with others, especially foreign people”. Of course it’s OK to appeal to friends or family or people of your own culture, but you have to think about far off people. If you don’t do this kind of effort music will be gone. Any kind of inspiration happens in our mind, not on the computer. It’s just a recorder. So if you use a computer as the tool like a camera for your inspiration, everyone’s inspiration sounds very similar.

I have a very good example. I was so moved to see [runner-up of Britain’s Got Talent] Susan Boyle singing. She is not a musician but her singing was really attractive. Music is always interactive for the creator or performer or audience, so we can share any kind of music easily. Imagine a new way of communicating by expressing through music, and then afterwards making music software for a game.

So you mean that the music should always come before the interaction in music games?
Yes. This is a very important thing.

You can read a feature about the making of Parappa The Rapper, containing another interview with Matsuura, in E205, which is out August 3 2009.