Our team developed MADWORLD here in Japan, and almost all of the staff were Japanese. I was constantly worried with the question of how my Japanese team would understand what makes people overseas laugh. It is a tough thing to do, and I worried if they were up to it.

However, as all the foreigners who had seen the signpost or the rose bush would bust up laughing, I came to believe that if we made the game on that level, other people overseas would be laughing with us as well. That’s when I instructed the team to, “Create gameplay situations and cause user reactions that we think are over-the-top, but don’t ever aim to get laughs!”

In truth, the reaction to the signpost from the team was awful. Everyone thought it was mean-spirited and left a bad taste in their mouth. However, I think that was just the standard Japanese reaction to things. When foreigners saw it, they laughed out loud. Their completely opposite reaction, that over-the-top brutality = laughs, was the moment I really realized that people, countries, and cultures are truly different. – MadWorld dev blog post, Shigenori Nishikawa

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