Artificial Intelligence has been part of pop culture for a long time, from films like the Kubrick masterpiece 2001: A Space Odyssey to games like RGG Studio’s first title, Binary Domain. Capcom, however, has found itself at a unique crossroads in time with its upcoming 2026 title, Pragmata, which features a main antagonist that is a rogue AI on the moon, leading to the struggles that the spacesuit-wearing protagonist and his young companion face. Manly, that since the game was concieved, AI has become a major part of the news cycle, which the developers had no idea would be the case.
Announced in 2020 during a PlayStation State of Play, Pragmata saw multiple delays before an announcement that the title would finally see release in 2026. Speaking to IGN during the Tokyo Game Show 2025, director Cho Yonghee and Naoto Oyama started the concept of Pragmata, which came about when Yonghee was thinking about the moon, which led him to ask his team to think up game ideas involving the moon. This eventually led to ideas of a “Black and White world” on the moon, with the AI character coming later in development. At that time, nobody knew they would be creating a game about AI amid a major news story about AI, such as Microsoft’s lay-offs, which many internal sources have claimed was made to pave the way for AI to replace many of those positions.
Yonghee stated in that interview:
We really couldn’t predict that AI would be this big from where we started from what you see now, but now that we have AI become this huge thing in the real world, we see like, ‘Oh, maybe we should have added this or that from what you see in the AI right now. So we are like, ‘We should have thought of that.
They went on to say the real-world shifts around AI didn’t have any major impact on the game’s direction itself, given that by the time these news stories started having major ramifications, the story and direction were already pretty set in stone. Oyama Said of this:
We have this sort of the idea of the AI in the game locked down very early in the development back when we released the concept trailer back a few years ago. And so we had that as what you see in the game basically. And then we really couldn’t predict that the AI would become this big right now.
Yonghee added to this, saying:
Yeah. So the real life AI’s progression or development, it’s been so fast that it’s perhaps overtaken what do we have in the game right now. So what you see in the game might not look as amazing than what’d you compared to real life.
Pragmata is set to be released on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series, and PC when it releases next year, though no official release date has been given yet.
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