One floor below his executive suite, Haruhiro Tsujimoto keeps a curiosity shop of video-game history that blares with Capcom’s best-loved products. Gothic horror and gore-spattered model weaponry sit happily with cutesy midget dragons and stuffed cartoon pirates.

Towering over the chirruping arcade game cabinets and the plastic Street Fighter II statuettes is a giant cardboard cutout of Wayne, plasma rifle in hand and the signature of the famous Korean film star he is based on scrawled across his face. Wayne, explains Capcom’s president, represents the future: game characters based on real-life movie actors, movies based on games and a total transformation of what it means to be a Japanese video games company.

In an exclusive interview on the eve of the Tokyo Game Show – the console and game software industry’s biggest showcase of the calendar – Mr Tsujimoto describes an industry on the brink of its biggest shift in years.

It is not just the “console wars” now pitting Nintendo against Sony and Microsoft that is driving the transformation. The consumers have changed and so, very slowly, have Japanese attitudes to the true value of content and intellectual property.

In terms of geography, age, sex, sophistication, and spending-power, the average gamer has changed from the one to whom Capcom appealed with its 1990s blockbusters. Japanese companies have realised that they have, for years, squandered their content and not realised the commercial potential of “cool, creative Japan”.

“The golden age of games may be in the past, but the change in technology and the change in attitudes has led to game companies finally becoming entertainment content companies,” Mr Tsujimoto said. “We’ve made games for decades, but we don’t just think about games on their own any more. When we come up with a title, we think of it as a complete content package – the game, the potential Hollywood movie, the toys and everything else.”

Mr Tsujimoto has ordered a complete change in the way the company approaches games development – part of a broader change in executive mindsets among Japanese companies.

He is studying the movie business, hinting that soon Capcom may be as much about films as games. The Biohaz-ard [ Resident Evil] series of games has already been made into three movies. Lost Planet and others will follow.

“I’m having lots of meetings in the US – I want to learn Hollywood and how to adapt our business to fit the way it works,” he says, adding that what Marvel Comics has done with characters that have become the Spider-man, X-Men and Hulk movies – is what he must do with Capcom. When it opens today, the Tokyo Game Show will possess its usual pizzazz, but a more complicated story is also unfolding. As a key organiser of the TGS, Mr Tsujimoto has extended the event from three to four days. The extra day, he says, will be game-fan free and allow companies to start talking to each other. One result, he says, is that we may be looking at the beginning of the end for consoles as stand-alone pieces of home equipment. But the consumer-facing essence will be about Nintendo – producer of the hugely successful Wii and DS consoles, More than ten million Wiis have been sold in less than a year.

Attracted to the “family-friendly” motion-sensitive controller, games companies have let their developers play around with ideas outside their strengths. Capcom, which has never made a sports simulation before, is now producing a golf game for the Wii.

Playing the game

— Capcom began life in Japan in 1979 as a manufacturer and distributor of electronic game machines

— Blockbuster franchises owned by Campcom include Resident Evil, Street Fighter, Breath of Fire and the Mega Man series

— Capcom sales in the six months to September 30 are expected to be 30.35 billion yen (£130 million), and an operating profit of 2.4 billion yen

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