Even though I had made few public comments during the intervening ten months between my remarks and interviewing Takeuchi, I followed much of the ensuing discussion along with Capcom’s steady rollout of promotional materials for the game. The Captivate ’08 trailer – from Chris Redfield’s voiceover (“I knew it from the moment I arrived. There’s no reason here, no humanity. Everywhere I look I find vacant stares. All I see is death”) over footage of frenzied crowds and mobs, to Sheva’s greeting on behalf of an entire continent (“Welcome to Africa”) – seemed particularly tone-deaf and still lacking in context. And while the Tokyo Game Show trailer finally added that much-needed context – the Umbrella Corporation, bioweapons, terrorists – it was from that 2008 conference that gameplay footage surfaced on YouTube of Chris and Sheva taking on black men dressed in grass skirts, sporting tribal-inspired masks and shields and wielding spears.
All of this was on my mind when I sat down to speak with Takeuchi on a Friday afternoon in his Las Vegas hotel suite. As is my wont, I didn’t go directly into the most sensitive topics. Instead, I led off with some questions about the game’s controls (he prefers the traditional RE4 setup), Dead Space (“a really great piece of work”) and Left 4 Dead (“it’s more based on going after the enemies yourself, whereas in Resident Evil 5, the idea is to stay alive”). After about 20 minutes or so of this, I asked him about what kind of research he and his team had done to prepare for RE5, and he said that the designers and artists had gone to Africa for two to three weeks, took thousands of photographs and brought them back to Japan. But when I followed up by asking which specific countries they visited, Takeuchi replied: “Unfortunately I can’t quite remember the names of the countries that they went to, but as far as I remember it was in North Africa.”
I asked him whether anyone at Capcom’s North American or European offices had expressed concern about the iconography of Chris Redfield going up against a slew of black zombies, to which he answered: “They had read the story of the game and they knew everything that was going on in the game. So, no, we didn’t really get any feedback like that, and I would say that’s the reason why.” But after I explained my own concerns about the trailer – more specifically, the manner in which it blurred the line between locals and zombies throughout, given the long history of dehumanising imagery of black people in Africa and the Caribbean – he prefaced his stock response that he had intended no message or political slant to the game by saying: “I feel like what I’m hearing from you now is a little bit different from how it was communicated to me in the first place.”
Takeuchi added that because the team’s North African research trip had educated them as to the diversity of the region, the reason the racial composition of the zombies in the various trailers evolved over time had nothing to do with any criticism and more to do with the production process. “When we were creating the E3 2007 trailer, we actually hadn’t finished the modelling for the other characters, so we had to reuse the same couple of patterns over and over again,” Takeuchi told me. “So that’s how that trailer ended up looking how it does. But listening to what you say now, and thinking about the trailer that we released at E3, I feel like I finally understand where you’re coming from.”
And as Takeuchi went on to explain that the enemies with the grass skirts and spears were seeking to defend the ruins from intruders and that he’d been inspired by the Indiana Jones movies, I felt like I once again understood where he’d been coming from. That a two-to-three-week trip to unspecified African countries and looking at a number of movies set in Africa alongside pop-cultural inspirations like the Indiana Jones series simply hadn’t been enough to sufficiently educate him or the team about the legacy of the imagery that they were tapping in to and, as a result, they’d lost control of their message. That’s my take on it, of course; I doubt that the man who sat across from me and thoughtfully answered all of my questions would agree. But if his muse should inspire him to set another game in an African country – or any real-world location, for that matter – my only wish is that he do so in as fully informed a manner as possible.