A portion of a Siliconera interview with director, Kotaro Uchikoshi…
S: What inspired the story of 999: Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors?
Kotaro Uchikoshi, Director: I think that’s a great question! Reason being, my inspiration came from exactly that, the question:
“Where do mankind’s inspirations come from?” That question alone was the root inspiration to this title. It all started from there and I started to read up on all sorts of documents. That’s when I came across an English biochemist named Rupert Sheldrake and I found out about his theory on the “Morphogenetic Field”.
“Why did glycerin start crystallizing all of a sudden?”, “When you make rats clear a maze, why is that with each new generation, the clear time gets shorter?”, “Why is it that as more people know an answer to a specific question, the chance of people knowing the answer goes up?” “Why is it when you were talking about a friend, you happen to get a phone call from that exact friend?”, “Why is it that if you’re at a café talking about Paris Hilton, the person next to you happened to be talking about her as well?”… Rupert Sheldrake’s theory gives us hints in order to answer these phenomena and this theme became the main theme behind 999.
S: Does Chunsoft have any plans with the Nintendo 3DS? Perhaps, a sequel to 999?
KU: We’d like to say “no comment” for now, but we’re thinking if we see that enough players in the U.S. enjoyed our title, there’s plenty of room to consider sequels.
Full interview here