“On Tuesday, October 25, Japanese-headquartered publisher and developer Koei (Dynasty Warriors series) held its expansion launch party for its subsidiary in Toronto, Koei Canada. Though Koei’s Canadian location was established in 2001 with a focus on CG, the team has now been expanded to function as a next generation development studio, working on its first title, Fatal Inertia, for the Playstation 3 launch.

As such, Gamasutra was there to witness the opening of Koei’s expanded offices in the presence of Koei co-founder Kou Shibusawa, and talk to the developers about why a Japanese company was expanding into Canadian territory for next-generation titles, and the company’s continuing plans for Western and worldwide expansion.”

This is another reason I owe my journalistic career to Brandon Sheffield; he was supposedly just hanging out with Koei PR rep Jarik Sikat when Jarik mentioned he was heading up to Toronto for a launch party. I was called up, covered it, and the rest is history. Jarik’s actually a really nice guy, and I regret I wasn’t able to catch up with him at E3.

This is a nice little piece that can act as a short primer on Koei’s history, but also features my first interview through a translator. While my Japanese can (at times) be useful, I’ll need to get a lot better if I ever expect to ever use it in interview situations. I was actually quite anxious before this interview, but I think it turned out really well, even using a second-hand dictaphone that liked to stop recording randomly. I’ve since picked up a Sony ICD-P210, which works nicely, though Sony have naturally made sure the audio files are in the most absurd proprietary format.