CAPCOM says they could not predict real-world AI growth when creating Pragmata’s story

At Tokyo Game Show 2025, Capcom’s Pragmata team admitted real-world AI advances surpassed their early concepts

Capcom’s new title Pragmata follows an astronaut and his android ally facing a rogue artificial intelligence on the moon. While AI has become a major global discussion point in recent years, the game’s developers said they had no idea it would rise so quickly when they began working on the project.

At Tokyo Game Show 2025, director Cho Yonghee explained that the game’s origins were not tied to AI at all. “I was just thinking about the moon,” he said, recalling how the team first envisioned a “black and white world” as the setting. The idea of an AI antagonist emerged later.

“We really couldn’t predict that AI would be this big from where we started,” Yonghee said. “Now that AI is this huge thing in the real world, we’re like, ‘Maybe we should have added this or that. We should have thought of that.’”

Producer Naoto Oyama confirmed that the storyline was finalised long before AI became a widely debated subject. “We had the idea of the AI in the game locked down very early, back when we released the concept trailer. We couldn’t predict it would become this big right now.”

Yonghee added that technological progress has moved faster than expected. “Real-life AI’s progression has been so fast that it’s perhaps overtaken what we have in the game.” Oyama echoed this, noting, “We created it to be in the near future, but the future has come closer.”

Pragmata is set to release next year, following its showcases at Gamescom 2025 and Tokyo Game Show 2025.