Konaka's 'welcome back to wired' retrospective blog
Not an interview but a first-person memoir Konaka started for the 20th anniversary, and a key primary source. In the first entry he stresses that the title began as a PlayStation project and that most of its large body of text was written by Ueda; Konaka only wrote scenarios for about thirty minutes of animated parts, and the basic plot was Ueda's, with Konaka acting as a go-between until director Tetsuya Endo turned those parts into film. The game's network was only a route for gathering information; its real genre was psycho-thriller. He describes ABe as a student whom Ueda found online and who offered ideas and writing as well as art; the game version of Lain's father came straight from a rough ABe drew without being asked. The game was built by a handful of people at a team called SR-12W, growing out of their previous title Noel, and the late-night anime was approved as promotion for the game. For TV, he was told he could use a completely different setting, and assumed the ending would match the game, with Lain shooting herself. Given total freedom, he was at a loss, so he wrote a very rough twelve-episode outline and planned to work the rest out while writing, which he later realized was the only way the series could have been made. A later entry relayed a correction from Nakahara about the 1998 ATR visit described in the 4Gamer interview.
- Ueda wrote most of the game's text and its basic plot
- Konaka wrote only about thirty minutes of animated parts for the game
- Tetsuya Endo directed the game's animated segments
- The game was made by a tiny team, SR-12W, after Noel
- The anime was approved partly to promote the game
- Konaka first assumed the anime would end with Lain shooting herself
- He wrote a rough twelve-episode outline, then improvised
Sources: animenewsnetwork.com