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Onimusha, Dino Crisis Not Forgotten at Capcom

Before Capcom turned their attention to desolate planets and hordes of creatively slaughtered undead, they spent a few years making games about samurais and dinosaurs. But if you’ve been wondering whatever did happen to their Onimusha and Dino Crisis franchises, Capcom’s Christian Svensson has a simple answer: they’re in "percolating" mode, awaiting for someone to come up with a good enough idea to reboot either series.
"Onimusha is tricky in particular given how Japanese-focused the franchise has been," said Svensson, VP of strategic planning and business development, to IGN. "When you look at the timing and sales trend of how Onimusha has gone each outing -- I won’t give you the exact numbers, but let’s just say every outing subsequently has been about 60 percent of the prior -- the brand doesn’t right now have quite the resilience that you might think."

Svensson says the result is that the first two Onimusha games were big sellers, while the last two were less successful. "For the time being I think it’s in percolate mode, that is to say, it’s not forgotten internally, there are discussions that go on, but I don’t think anyone has sort has come up with the ’that’s it’ idea of how to get the game back up to 3 or 4 million units."

And as for Dino Crisis, it’s mostly the same story. "Dino Crisis 3 I think is where it went off the rails if I recall," Svensson said, referring to the last game in the series that bizarrely was set on a space ship in the future. "Dino Crisis’ success really was an out cropping of Resident Evil 1 and 2. There are discussions, Dino Crisis comes up from time to time, but there isn’t any burning desire from R&D or the business side to light that franchise back up again."

So both franchises now lie in hibernation, awaiting "an internal champion with something incredible," according to Svensson. He did at least tease that with Onimusha, "You may see some things of the brand pop up in the future, I can’t say what, but there are certainly discussions about it." As for Dino Crisis, maybe don’t hold your breath.

"As much as I love Dino Crisis, I don’t think pre-rendered backgrounds [and] tank-controlled dinos are going to sell to the level that’s going to cover the budgets that it takes to make something competitive in that space," Svensson said.