Hideki Kamiya: Million-Dollar Retro Game Auctions “Holding Game Culture Back”

Hideki Kamiya, Creative Director at Platinum Games and creator of the Devil May Cry, Bayonetta and Viewtiful Joe series, opened up about his thoughts on retro game auctions.

In an interview with Videogames Chronicle, Kamiya was explaining his next project, Sol Cresta, and his love for retro gaming when he was asked about the recent expose into retro gaming auctions, where games were being sold at inflated price.

“As a collector myself, I understand the lure of wanting to have that game in the sealed package”, he says. “People want the value of that package and not necessarily of the game itself. But as a fan, it’s a problem if somebody wants to play a game but they can’t get it because it’s being traded in these ridiculous marketplaces”.

That being said, he never outright blames the collectors for making some retro games so hard to find. Instead he echoed a common sentiment in the game community- that IP holders needed to better preserve their most classic titles.

“…The responsibility for keeping those games available belongs to the company that owns the IP. If people want to play a classic game and they can’t, because it’s not available on new platforms and can’t be found in its original form either, that’s like a threat… it’s holding game culture back.”, Kamiya clarifies. “The people who own the rights to these games should be actively making moves to preserve game culture and making games available to everyone who wants to play them”.

This isn’t an uncommon sentiment- part of the reason backwards compatibility was such a huge feature on the PS5 and Xbox Series X is that many people don’t like the idea of their old games becoming unplayable once a new generation starts. The sentiment shows in full force whenever a re-release of a WiiU game in particular is announced, with the phrase “no longer trapped on the WiiU” being commonly used to describe titles like Bayonetta 2 and Fatal Frame: Maiden of Blackwater.