WorthPlaying.com caught up with Capcom's senior communications director, Chris Kramer, to discuss the upcoming release of Tatsunoko vs. Capcom.WP: One of the big announcements for E3 was the fact that Tatsunoko vs. Capcom is coming to the U.S. and Europe. What was it like getting that brought over? We kept hearing that it was never leaving Japan because licensing is hell.
CK: Tatsunoko vs. Capcom is one of those games that, when it was first announced in Japan, the media assumption was that the game would never leave Japan. Tatsunoko, for those who don't know what it is, we like to describe them as the Hanna-Barbera of Japan. For close to 50 years, Tatsunoko has been doing some of the biggest and most influential anime series in Japan. They've had a hand in everything from Gatchaman, which people in the U.S. know as G-Force or Battle of the Planets, all the way through Neon Genesis Evangelion, and with a whole range of Japanese anime that a lot of people really aren't familiar with. There are so many characters that have been in the U.S. or been in Europe or never made it out of Japan. A lot of people assumed that the licensing hurdles would make it nearly impossible to get that here in the U.S., but at the root, the core, the game itself is so amazing that we knew in North America that we had to have the game here, and that we were going to do everything we could to make sure that licensing issues were solved, licensors were happy, everything went really well, and the partnership in Japan with Tatsunoko as the parent license company has been so solid that it's actually been an amazingly smooth transition to get this game here.
