I can remember growing up and turning to a local TV channel on Sunday mornings on the off-chance that they'd be showing a Godzilla movie, and I'd sit through the whole thing, bad dubbing and all, but I didn't care – I just wanted to see Godzilla…or more specifically Godzilla fighting other monsters! For those Godzilla fans who don't want to just see monsters fight but actually control them, then Godzilla: Unleashed looks like it will be just the Toho monster fighter for you. We got to ask Shelby Wills, Godzilla: Unleashed's producer at Pipeworks, some questions about the upcoming game to find out as much as we could about Godzilla's latest outing in the world of videogames.

It's been confirmed that there are going to be at least 23 monsters throughout Godzilla's history represented in Godzilla: Unleashed. Can you tell us as many (or all) of the monsters if possible?

Actually, we have a site designed specifically for revealing new monsters. It’s www.godzilla.com and you’ll find all of the monsters we’ve revealed up until now right there. All I can say about the final monster roster is that we think fans will be pleased with who we’ve included. :)

When developing the game how much time was spent in the research phase and what all did that include? Did you study up on the movies? Did you research the dimensions for the monsters to get their scale in comparison to each other just right?

The research process for a game like this is long, but fun. We needed to make each monster as similar to its film counterpart as possible, so watching movies, researching available moves and weapons, size scale, colors, etc., is always involved.

When sitting down to come up with the monsters from Godzilla's history, how did you go about choosing the monsters? Were there certain criteria that needed to be met, did monsters have to meet certain requirements such as an intricacy that might be difficult to pull off in the game, etc.?

Good question. A lot of thought has to go into such a critical decision as which monsters to include in the game. Our decisions were influenced by several different factors. Obviously, you want to include the monsters that are most popular, that fans really love, so we tried to include all the fan favorites from the beginning. Balance was also a factor – we didn’t want all of the monsters to look and move alike, so we included monsters that represent a wide variety of sizes, shapes, appearances, abilities, movements, and so on. We even went beyond all of that and created two new monsters that haven’t been seen in the Toho universe yet, so fans have that to look forward to as well. We basically tried to pick the monsters that we felt fans would have the most fun playing as and, like I said earlier, we feel that the fans will be pleased with the final roster.

How many of the established Toho monsters are specifically new to this game, having never appeared in one of the past fighting games before?

You’ll have to wait for the final roster for the answer to that question, sorry. :)

Besides the monsters fans are familiar with, there are also some new monsters introduced. Can you tell us about the new monsters created just for the game and how involved was Toho involved in their creation and look? Is there the possibility of these monsters transferring from the game to an eventual Godzilla movie?

We were fortunate to be able to work with Toho on creating two completely new monsters specifically for Godzilla Unleashed. The two monsters were chosen in very different ways. Krystalak (who we created specifically to be a villain in this game) went through several different iterations during in his design phase. Eventually, we came to a final design that Pipeworks, Toho and Atari were happy with, and that’s how he looks today. The second monster we created, Obsidius, was selected in a different way. He was designed to be part of a fan contest. We started with 20 original concepts and narrowed them down to four concepts that we sent to Toho for approval. With their blessing, we presented these four concepts to fans online and asked them to vote for their favorite, and later to name him. The winner ended up being Obsidius, and he’ll be featured in Godzilla Unleashed in all of his volcanic glory!

The new monsters will officially become part of the Toho universe, but what goes into Godzilla movies is really up to Toho. :)

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