Denfami recently published the first half of an interview with Inti Creates president Takuya Aizu that touches on their early life, entering the game industry, forming Inti Creates and more, with a particular focus on why his stint at Capcom was so brief and how he and his team were able to remain cordial with Capcom after essentially walking out on them.
It's an interesting read, and it lays out the full chronology of their Capcom-to-Inti transition and Inti's early business, which I'd heard in bits and pieces but never in full, so I figure it's worth breaking down—I barely have time to summarise, let alone fully translate, so apologies if this reads like I'm blowing past everything:
(they published the second half of the interview as I was typing—I might come back to it later, but I gotta read it first!)
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Aizu's introductions to games and game development was quite conventional: his dad bought a Famicom; they eventually got hooked on Family Basic, which transitioned to an interest in computers and programming for PC-88, which then escalated to programming sound drivers and other software and producing games as part of a doujin circle in Nagoya, and it was from that point that they harboured dreams of forming their own company. (Global fan researchers recently unearthed one of the old doujin games he worked on and shared it on Twitter, which he got a big kick out of.)
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Aizu had no aspirations to attend university and wanted to work for Wolf Team out of high school, but his parents weren't having it and pushed him to join a trade school and earn an IT certificate. At the end of his three-year stint, and just as his parents started asking if he'd received any job offers, he got an offer from Capcom—during the interview, he mentioned that he was working part-time as both a programmer and at his dad's yakitori restaurant, which prompted the interviewer to spend the rest of the interview querying about the particulars of cooking yakitori, so Aizu went home assuming he didn't get the job, only to find out he'd been hired... somehow, working part-time at his dad's restaurant was the key to employment.
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Aizu's parents had always said "this kid's either going to end up being a company president or end up begging on the street", so Aizu had taken that idea to heart as a child; even so, his brief stint with Capcom didn't strike him as unusual, as the culture within Capcom was that they received a lot of transitory employees who were destined to "graduate", and they even joked about "Capcom Vocational School" and so on. Even so, Aizu wasn't working there with one foot out the door: they wanted to cultivate their skills and would have been happy to stay there forever if things were going well, but then circumstances changed...
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Back then ('93~94), there was a clear difference in workplace manner between the devs, who wore plainclothes, and management, who wore suits, so if you saw someone in a suit, you knew they were a bigshot; Aizu saw this and decided he was going to start wearing a suit to work, which had the unintended effect of seeing him getting dragged into managerial work at the start of his second year at Capcom—specifically, he'd been "promoted" into a role that required him to essentially "translate" technical proposals into plain language for president Kenji Tsujimoto, then signing off on those reports as if he were the section manager.
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After a lot of complaining, Aizu was able to return to programming in their third year of work, but with the caveat that they were also forced to handle project management. Frustrated at their job, as well as the company bureaucracy that kept talented devs from being able to link up and make cool games (which he's quick to emphasise was true of Capcom back then, not now), he started talking to certain people about going independent.
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One of the people approached by Aizu mentioned that they'd won a talent program run by Sony Music called "Club DEP", which had given them a ¥2M deal to make an original game; Aizu saw this as an opportunity and told Sony Music, "there are 10 of us who want to leave and form our own company, so how about you give us ¥100M as a collective?"—Sony Music replied by saying "if you want to prove your worth, send us 100 original mini-pitches", so Aizu & co. got to work on knocking out pitches, and soon had their money secure.
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From there, it was just a matter of finding an exit strategy, but that too had its complications: around that time, home division section chief Tokuro Fujiwara was rumoured to be preparing to leave and form his own company, which had management skittish, and people throwing around suspicions of people preparing to leave. At this point, Aizu had told them he was quitting due to back issues (which wasn't entirely untrue; he'd been hospitalised for them before, and intended to take a break) but management was convinced he and his pals were leaving to join Fujiwara, and for the remainder of his time there, they squabbled about why he was quitting and how they were willing to let it slide because it was Fujiwara, they just wanted him to come clean, with Aizu insisting that they had their wires crossed. (Later on, some of those same people chewed him out like, "we let you leave to go join Fujiwara, not to go form some other company!"
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Sony Music had them move from Osaka to Tokyo, so the ten of them (plus one other person who came a little later) rented an office there, and Aizu collected ¥1M from everyone to form the LLC, meaning they had 11 co-owners and directors (which ended up causing trouble down the line...)
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Returning to Aizu's time at Capcom: upon joining, he was put to work on the Breath of Fire II team, for which he handled background/environmental programming, which included working on the overworld and maps, as well as stage-altering effects seen during battles. After that wrapped up, he got pulled into the job he mentioned earlier, and was eventually made assistant manager of the PC division; once he was able to resume programming, he worked on the PC version of Resident Evil: specifically, a pre-DirectX, pre-Windows 95 version that got canned in favour of a Windows 95 port. From there, they started working on a 3D version of Street Fighter II, but after they got called out by the arcade team for striking out on their own without permission, they intended to turn it into an original game, but then people started quitting and that was that. Ultimately, Breath of Fire II's the only game Aizu worked on that made it to market—one might presume he worked on Mega Man, given Inti's future output, but while others like Inti VP Yoshihisa Tsuda worked on the likes of Mega Man 7 and Mega Man X2, Aizu himself never touched the series.
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Inti's ¥100M project turned out to be the PlayStation game Speed Power Gunbike, which ultimately didn't sell very well; of the 11 people that formed Inti, 2 were working in support roles, so the game was made by the remaining 9 people, which includes co-directors Tsuda and the award-winner mentioned earlier (whose name Aizu doesn't mention as they're no longer with Inti, but it's out there).
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The interviewer asks whether their relationship with Capcom was strained after going independent, to which Aizu replies, not really, and gives two explanations as to why: firstly, he figures that he and his crew were so unimportant that nobody powerful really cared about them leaving; and secondly, a lot of the older managerial-class types who might've held a grudge about them leaving ended up leaving themselves around the same time, and the people left at Capcom were colleagues and peers with whom they remained close, so while they might throw out sly little jabs now and again, there was never any serious animosity. (He also quipped that Capcom's much icier nowadays, which he was very quick to walk back...)
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The road from Gunbike to Mega Man Zero is quite long: after the release of Gunbike, Sony Computer Entertainment took a controlling stake in Sony Music Entertainment and started opening satellite studios, so between that and the poor sales of Gunbike, Inti was worried that their relationship might have ended, and they spent 4~5 months with no income and no work, living off savings. Eventually, one of these satellite studios approached them about working on Love & Destroy, but that game also failed to sell well, and afterwards, there was an ~8-month stretch where Aizu was living on cheap salted pasta, and their end-of-year celebrations were centred around extravagant dishes like "cabbage" and "chicken". One reason for Inti's slump during this time was that the individual members couldn't agree on a direction—whether to continue pursuing state-of-the-art 3D games on contemporary hardware like PS2 vs. making side-scrolling pixel art games, for instance—and in the end, the majority voted to take on more employees and adopt a more traditional structure with a defined heirarchy, for the sake of moving forward. (Those who didn't agree with that direction ended up leaving within a few years; of the 11 founding members, 6 remain.)
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When it came to discussing making a 2D action game, Tsuda's stance was, "if we're going to make a pixel art game, I want to make Mega Man", (to which people immediately replied, "...so why'd you quit Capcom, exactly?"), so when Aizu was at E3, he was able to talk directly to Inafune—Aizu notes that there's typically no easy way to approach higher-level company members at Japanese events, but at overseas events like E3, they're usually just sitting in some booth, not talking to anyone, so you can just walk right up and speak to 'em. Aizu told Inafune that Tsuda wanted to make a Mega Man game and Inafune replied, "sure, send me a pitch"; Aizu sort of brushed it off as politeness on Inafune's part, but when they happened to see each other at TGS, Inafune told him "you never sent me that pitch you told me about" and Aizu was like, "wait, you were serious?!", so from there they formally pitched the game which became Mega Man Zero. At Inafune's suggestion, they had Inti staffer & ex-Capcom designer Toru Nakayama handle character design, and they were able to bring on other ex-Capcom folk who'd left at the same time as they did, and who'd previously worked on Makaimura and Breath of Fire, to bolster their ranks.
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Inti was in a precarious position at that time, so Inafune's actions came in the nick of time and allowed them a chance to revitalise (and, like, eat), and they really put their all into that game. Even now, he thinks of Inafune as a lifesaver, and whenever Inafune asks anything of him (including, say, participating in a kickstarter), "the two answers aren't 'yes' or 'no', they're 'yes' or 'yes'". The interviewer asks if they still have a relationship, and Aizu reminds him that Inafune's still an advisor on the Gunvolt series.
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During Inafune's time at Capcom, Inti was able to make Mega Man Zero 1~4, Mega Man ZX & ZX Advent, Mega Man 9 and Mega Man 10; Inafune was also instrumental in Aizu becoming a producer, not just by appointing him the responsibility when it'd traditionally fall on Capcom, but also by showing the ropes and tagging him in on meetings with advertisers and all the other producer-type stuff Capcom was doing at the time, and Aizu really does feel like he owes a great debt to Inafune for what he was given. Aizu has absolutely no clue why Inafune took it upon himself to take Aizu under his wing like that, but he figures he was simply fond of the people at Inti and wanted to help the company survive under their own weight.
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After they'd got the ball rolling with Capcom, they were able to take the system they'd built making the Zero games and use them to make games based on Crayon Shin-chan, which they'd been approached to make at an earlier point by a representative of Banpresto's game studio; from there, they established two solid development lines centred around Mega Man and Shin-chan, and as the company stabilised, they once again reformed the company to slim down the executive faction and essentially adopt a traditional top-down structure. Aizu notes that he had to reform the company twice and almost went bankrupt twice in their first five years (and only survived because the people involved were all young and were willing to endure stretches where they weren't getting paid) and the company as it exists today is actually his third shot at making it work. Thanks to those two production lines, the company's been in the black ever since, and he remains extremely grateful to both of them.