Are these two guys, pretending to be an elephant for the sake of their Project Natal overlord, the future of home video games? At least three people think so — Grasshopper Manufacture head Goichi Suda, Level-5 boss Akihiro Hino, and Q Entertainment’s Tetsuya Mizuguchi. All three creators weighed in on last month’s blockbuster E3 conference in this week’s issue of Famitsu magazine, and everyone agreed that this show was all about the big ideas of the future — chief among them, motion control.

“Hardware-wise, it was all about Project Natal,” Suda said. “It’s hard to really understand it unless you use it, and it remains to be seen what you can do with it, but I think it’ll be a huge device. We developed No More Heroes with the Wii remote in mind, but now I want to think about games with Natal in mind. I have to ask myself, as a game designer, what new games can be done with this, what can be an interesting experience and challenge, and I’m looking forward to that.”

Mizuguchi, a designer whose games have a noticeably “futuristic” aspect to them, enthusiastically agreed. “With new technology announcements like Natal and the [PS3] Motion Controller, it’s like I have a feel for the new generation, or that the door to the future has been opened,” he said. “It’s a wholly different impression of the future than we had before. It’s not a shift from 2D to 3D or in the number of polygons, but it’s games trying to open up an entirely new door. I thought it would take longer, but it’s happening faster than I expected.”

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