Capcom initiates college grads with iPhone game creation

Capcom has let folks in on a dirty little secret regarding its initiation of hires at the firm, and no, it's not really dirty. The byline just sounds better using that word.

Instead of making them dance with a goat, toilet paper Haruhiro Tsujimoto's house, or streak through a Southern Baptist convention, the new hires were tasked with creating a game for iPhone called Planet Work.

Hitting the App Store today, the action game puts the player in the shoes of an intergalactic garbage man.

"Game projects as of late have grown into incredibly huge things in scope," Capcom's Jun Takeuchi told Famitsu (via 1UP). "It's hard to produce one game a year the way that people used to be able to do. That got me thinking that perhaps the best way to get our new employees a taste of the peaks and valleys of game development is to have them produce a game of their own by themselves."

The recent college grads hired by the firm created the game from scratch, and had their hands in every aspect of its development.

"Normally we'd have them be part of a larger team, learning the process bit by bit from veteran employees - a low-risk, low-return method," Takeuchi said. "There's a limit to what they can get out of that. They wind up not being able to do anything unless someone tells them how to do it. I figured it'd be a better experience for all of the new hires if they trial-and-errored their way through the process by themselves instead."

Takeuchi hopes such an initiative will help out the younger generation getting into the business, as most creators in the industry were "born in the 1970s."

"I think one of the most important missions of this group is to raise and nurture the next generation of creators," he said. "I think it'd be great if we could get the industry to think about this more seriously through this project - it'd be nice if it resulted in a new group of game designers that still show up in Famitsu's pages five years from now."

Thanks, Eurogamer.