Tetsuya Mizuguchi on the return of Lumines – and why premium games could bounce back

After launching Lumines Remastered this summer, Tetsuya Mizuguchi says he could bring more of his games to mobile soon. He also believes modern mobile players are increasingly open to premium-style games, after years of free to play dominance.

July’s surprise release of Lumines Remastered on iOS and Android marked the first true return for the cult PSP puzzler since its 2018 rerelease on PC and consoles.

Lumines creator Tetsuya Mizuguchi, also the mind behind cult classics Rez, Space Channel 5 and Child of Eden, told us that a mobile iteration of the original experience was only a matter of time.

“Looking all the way back at the history of Lumines, we really wanted to bring it to phone-style devices, even before the notion of smartphones was commonplace. The original was a handheld title, and I feel like a lot of that DNA has been inherited by what we now do with smartphones.”

Last year’s series comeback Lumines Arise, released on PS5, PSVR and PC, provided the impetus to bring the original game to mobile. And to make that happen, Mizuguchi’s studio Enhance turned to Sound Games.

VP of development at Enhance Julian Chunovic explains. “I knew they had really strong chops in understanding what it meant to build a good mobile experience,” Chunovic told us. “They had a lot of very interesting tools to make porting and release really effective and easy and smooth, so that you didn’t lose anything in the transition.”

Sound Games was so enthusiastic about the idea, it voluntarily provided a prototype that impressed Mizuguchi. “From that very first mockup we had a buttery smooth frame rate, all the colour and saturation working, and proof of concept on haptics,” says Mizuguchi. “It was really clear that they could hit the quality bars. And so I told Julian we should really move forward with this.”

While this is the first mobile port of the original Lumines, the series has been adapted to mobile before, most recently in 2016’s Lumines: Puzzle & Music. But that title was produced by an external developer, and reformatted the gameplay to be playable in portrait.

“It was meant to be played with one hand, and so while it had the engine of Lumines, it was a different experience and a different flavour,” says Mizuguchi, adding that the live service elements and its associated costs made it difficult to keep running.

The title was eventually delisted in 2020, its short life another reason Mizuguchi cites for his desire to preserve his original vision for Lumines on mobile.

Chunovic says that Enhance and Sound Games used their experience from past projects to strike a balance between keeping “the magic of the experience” while “bending the game design to help support the mobile use case” in two main ways.

First, they implemented a suspend feature to deal with the usual interruptions of mobile play. Second, the port offers multiple control schemes, including one with on-screen buttons to simulate the original input system, and another that uses gestures for a pure mobile experience. Players can also connect an external controller.

“The physical controller affords a certain amount of tactile feedback, and so many of the games I make are about embodying that reaction” says Mizuguchi. “The challenge with touchscreens is that you lose a lot of that. You’re still touching something, but it’s a flat surface.”

He found a solution in haptics. “They give us the ability to provide a texture of feedback, something that keeps you rhythmically locked in to the experience,” Mizuguchi continues, adding that he has to tread a fine line to manage noise and battery drain. For the port, the team included both haptic modes available in the original remaster (player inputs and musical beat) but only the former is activated by default as a compromise.

The port seems to have landed well, says Chunovic, who adds that the team is particularly happy about the feedback from Android players, given the challenges of the notoriously fragmented platform. So is Mizuguchi thinking about bringing more of his games to mobile?

“Yeah, absolutely,” he tells us. “As mobile devices evolve and become capable of more high fidelity experiences, my inclination to bring more to these platforms definitely increases,” he says, pointing out that challenges remain, given how mobile monetization patterns have changed perceptions of value. “It’s really important for us to make sure that we can create the right expectation of value.”

He highlights that the team chose the free-to-start model with a one time purchase to let players try the game at no cost in the hope that they see value in buying the rest of it.

“I think there’s been a lot of exposure to different models and different ways that players can trade, for example, time for experience and how rich that experience is,” says Mizuguchi.

“It used to be, with mobile being more emergent, it was more focused on how you could make the most profitable model. But as players become more sensitive to how they spend their time, I think there is a growing segment of consumers, that’s really interested in getting the richest experience for the time they’re going to spend on the game. And so maybe that’s helping to drive some of these trends.”

For Mizuguchi, that value is ultimately in the innovation he has always pursued.

“We want to enable new experiences no matter where we are, and take advantage of what technology offers us. And so in that sense, mobile is an exciting place to look at the future.”

Tetsuya Mizuguchi photo credit: Michinori Aoki