Following Eternal DArkness' release in Japan, NCL interviewed Denis Dyack and Yamada-san about the game. Thanks to PGC for the translation!

Nintendo Online Monthly: First, we would like to ask in what form did the production take place?

Yamada: Nintendo and Silicon Knights developed this game together. The staff of Silicon Knights respected the works of Nintendo very much, and they were very happy to work with us. With that joint development, everything went very smoothly.

NOM: The production time was quite long, wasn't it?

Yamada: Hmm. It took a while. Everyone at Silicon Knights are very involved with their work, and during the last months, everyone worked on the game without taking any holidays. It was partly because we made loads of impossible requests. (laugh)

NOM: Where did the game's idea come from?

Yamada: Silicon Knights was responsible for the basic story, character settings, and game system. With those materials, we reworked it with Silicon Knights' staff, and we basically upgraded the game as a whole. The result is the game you are playing now.

NOM: Why did you make this game?

Denis: Initially we wanted to make an horror game, but a game that was totally different from what were already out there in the market.

Yamada: Denis himself also really likes Japanese horror genre games like Biohazard and Silent Hill. However, this time we agreed on aiming to build a different kind of game.

Denis: We aimed at a horror that had more of a literary scent.

NOM: We see a lot of cinematic sequences in the game. Were there any movies that you used as reference?

Denis: Director John Carpenter's Mouth of Madness and Hitchcock's suspense-building techniques come to the mind, but we had inspirations from a lot of movies. To list them all would be quite impossible.

NOM: Why did you decide on a story that involved time changing?

Denis: First, I really have a lot of interest in history. Therefore, there were many parts that were really based on actual history, although there were arrangements made for the game. We also wanted to bring to the player a grand storyline that immersed them with the game's reality as well a sense of history. We created an premise in which people can experience the different times by employing Pious Augustus, who can live through thousands of years, in the story.

NOM: In the game there were various old buildings and structures. Did you actually go to places like ancient ruins to for ideas?

Denis: We could not actually go, but we really spent a lot of time researching buildings in each era. The builds that appear in the game do not actually exist, but they had the style and decorations from their respective time periods.

Yamada: I remember that there was a scene in the game that had stained glass. And when we looked it up, we found out that stained glass was not invented until 50 years later in that time period. As a result, we took that all out from the background. We pointed out a lot of those things to Silicon Knights. The Japan team also researched a lot.

Denis: That is right. Although I did research myself, the Nintendo staff including Yamada-san looked up a lot of stuff for us. They even checked detailed parts like "How many years is the gap?" There should really be relatively little or no contradiction in the time design part of the story.

We'll bring you Part 2 of the interview soon!

Source: Planet GameCube