Tetsuya Mizuguchi swallows the last of his lunch and peers out the window, onto the beach and the English Channel beyond. It's sparkling today on the British south coast. Twenty-four hours ago, not so much—but the sun's out for the Japanese developer's arrival at Develop Conference, held in the bustling seaside city's Hilton hotel.

"I first came here, to Brighton, to meet the musician Adam Freeland. That was 1998. I explained to him the idea of Rez. He decided to join the project. Wow. That's almost 20 years ago."

Now, Mizuguchi's working on something new, something (he says) better than "Area X," something he's not actually prepared to discuss publically just yet. He set up his own studio, Enhance Games, in 2014, and it was there that he guided Infinite to how he imagined it so many years earlier. He's dreaming big when it comes to VR—and he is determined, as he goes on to tell me, to create magic.

Rez really found its final form a full 15 years after its original release, though, when it emerged as a PlayStation VR launch title under the name Rez Infinite. What you got was the same game, in a way, albeit now as a full 360-degree audio-visual experience; and an all-new stage, the off-rails, float-anywhere "Area X," which is as close as anything on VR has come to legitimately blowing my mind. You can read more about Rez Infinite and "Area X" in our The Pick-Me-Up series.

He first made his name with Sega racers for the arcades, producing Sega Rally and its sequel, and Manx TT Superbike. Then came music, with Space Channel 5, the Lumines series, and most famously Rez—the techno-driven rail-shooter where seeing the beats was as big as part of the experience as hearing them (and, naturally, blasting them). The intent then: to create a sense of synesthesia in the player.

Earlier, he was on stage, in conversation with Edge editor Nathan Brown, unpicking his career and where he wants to take it next. I miss the keynote as I'm interviewing someone else—in the same building, a few floors up, more to come on that soon—at the time, but what Mizuguchi's done in the past is well documented already.

Tetsuya Mizuguchi: In my head, in my imagination, Rez was always a VR game, from the start, from the original in 2001. We needed to squeeze and trim it, to make it a 2D game. But imagination isn't like that. I think Rez in VR is very natural, and that's a big reason why it was a success.

_Rez Infinite_** , and its additional "Area X," was one of the main reasons to pick up PlayStation VR at launch. Could you have been any happier with how that new version of the game, and that new stage, was received?**

That's a good question. I think that side of games, that feel that people have for them and take away from them, is getting better. Twenty years ago, when I was working on racing games, I couldn't imagine in that way—I couldn't think about how these games could impact the players in an emotional way. Then I jumped into music, and those ideas, and the imagination there, that was a long journey—and during it, we tried lots of things, building and scrapping things many times. I learned a lot in the process, through trial and error, in working towards these games being more than just pressing buttons to do things. Now, I think I'm in the best condition, the best position, to be able to realize what I want people to get out of games. And I'm very, very happy.

People, players, were genuinely moved by playing "Area X." When it comes to designing games, experiences, are you focused on what the player impression is, what they take away from it, as much as actually ensuring the mechanics of the game operate? Are you more into, I suppose, the feel of a game, rather than the moment-to-moment movement, and how those movements are implemented?

Also, I was always thinking about what VR game I would make in the future, what the future of Rez might be. So it was easy to move to VR. And with "Area X," I knew that we had to be free, released from being a rail shooter. Some people in my team, they were worried about players getting sick when playing it; but I had confidence that we'd be able to deliver this really good, feel-good experience. If we couldn't do that, we couldn't possibly start thinking about the future of VR. So yes, it was a good result.

To make games, is a most wonderful thing. And it's not just being a games designer—you're a human experience designer, right? So, the game designers of today, they've grown a lot—and with that comes better and better experiences. So my next game, it'll be better than "Area X"—well, I hope so!

Technology is expanding in all directions—haptic, VR, sensors, audio, although we've nearly gone as far as we can with audio in games, I think. So there's no limit now. I don't think there is, anyway. I'm always thinking: what is the future gaming experience? A long time ago there were no colors, just dots on a screen, bleep sounds. Now, we can express so much more, combining so many elements, and it's possible, genuinely, to move people.

We can put a story in there, as an experience; but there are other dimensions too, to consider. "Area X" was a kind of experiment, to me, to see what we can do at that next level. And it was a really good experiment. We found we could move people, with music and 3D visuals, and synesthesia. Seeing the sound, that's something we couldn't do this way, before. We can't taste it just yet. Maybe in the future.

"I have no interest in making things just look realistic—I want to make magic!"

Does that all feed into a personal philosophy, for you, where making games is all about the takeaway, and how it fires up the player's emotions and imagination? Rather than, I suppose: this thing has to look a certain way, because video games are hyper-realistic now. I'm guessing here, based on your recent work, but I don't think you're too bothered about realism in your games. You quite deliberately want to take players out of the "real world."