Studio Profile
A tight-knit group of expats living the indie-dev dream in Japan
We visit 17-Bit, a tight-knit group of expats living the indie-dev dream in Japan
“JAPANESE STUDIOS ARE KNOWN FOR LONG HOURS AND REALLY BAD PAY, AND I WAS TRYING TO HAVE A FAMILY”
Not many success stories start with a betrayal. Yet that’s precisely how 17-Bit began. Jake Kazdal was the art director at Zombie Studios, the Seattle-based developer on Blacklight: Tango
Down. In his spare time, he’d been working on something – something that, eventually, would lay the foundations of a studio he’d been talking for years about setting up with one of his best friends. He’d taken the Zombie gig after leaving his job at EA in Los Angeles so he could be in Seattle, where the pair intended to set up shop. Then, the friend – if you can call him that – took a job at Ubisoft Montreal. “He up and left,” Kazdal tells us. “He just bailed. I was like, ‘Fuck it. I’m doing it myself’.”
Fast forward nine years and Kazdal has, indeed, done it. 17-Bit is now working on its fourth project, and has moved across the globe; while it retains a small, two-person team and an office in Seattle, the bulk of the studio is now based in Kyoto, Japan, in an unassuming twofloor house on a side street near the Imperial palace. The development team, comprised almost entirely of expats, shares an open-plan space on the upper floor; downstairs, one bedroom has been converted into a meeting room, while the others are left nearly empty for visitors to crash out in.
There’s a homely feel to the place, the small, tight-knit team of veterans surrounded by toys and trinkets from Kazdal’s lifelong love of games and enviable career. In the early 2000s he worked for Sega under Tetsuya Mizuguchi, as an artist on Space Channel 5 and Rez. He quit in 2003 and moved to Los Angeles, got an art degree, and joined EA, where he was part of the team that worked with Steven Spielberg on the neverreleased LMNO.
Ever since he
left Japan, however, he’d wanted to go back. “I missed it like hell. I wasn’t happy living in the US; I wanted out, to get back to Japan, where most of my best friends were.” He looked first for a route back into the Japanese game industry, but found nothing. “I didn’t want to be a 3D artist any more; I wanted to focus more on concept art, but in Japan, it’s much harder to find dedicated positions for that – they just don’t do it as much. And while I’d loved my time at Sega, that studio was gone. Japanese studios are also known for long hours and really bad pay, and I was trying to have a family. I didn’t see a way back into the Japanese corporate lifestyle.”
He’d work it out eventually, but first there was a studio to build. The concept Kazdal had been working on in his spare time while at Zombie was a mobile-centric strategy game about samurai. After his friend abandoned him, he talked to Borut Pfeifer, who’d been an AI engineer on the Spielberg project. Pfeifer had just quit EA to go indie, and liked what Kazdal was doing. Ben Vance, another LMNO engineer, came on board too. The samurai idea grew into undead samurai (“All of a sudden you could have magic, all this other cool stuff,” Kazdal says). The game, now called Skulls Of The
Shogun, was coming along nicely, with Kazdal and Vance working on it in their spare time and Pfeifer the sole full-timer, paid using funding Kazdal had borrowed from his father. Pfeifer had a problem, though. “Borut said, like, ‘I fucking hate iOS’,” Kazdal recalls. He suggested moving to Microsoft’s short-lived XNA, a coding environment that let indies make games for Xbox.
Things moved quickly. They showed Skulls to Microsoft, and Chris Charla loved it. “They just signed it,” Kazdal says. “I was like, ‘Sweet, we have a company now’.” By the end of 2010 17-Bit had an office space in Seattle, and a handful of new hires – two of whom staff the Seattle studio today – though Pfeifer and Vance remained in LA. The hard work, however, was far from over. Microsoft didn’t just want Skulls Of The
Shogun on Xbox. The game became a posterchild for cross-platform play, powered by the briefly hyped, and then quickly widely detested, Windows 8. No doubt it seemed like a good idea at the time: this young studio was, after all, partnering with one of the biggest tech companies on the planet, and would be a standard bearer for games not just on Windows 8, but also on the new Surface line of tablets, Windows Phone and, of course, Xbox Live Arcade. What Kazdal and team hadn’t realised, however, was just how dysfunctional a massive company can be – especially in cases like this, where previously discrete divisions suddenly found themselves needing to work together. It was, to put it mildly, a mess, and 17-Bit was right in the middle of it.
“The game divisions weren’t talking to each other,” Kazdal says. “The Windows 8 team was completely separate from the mobile division, which was completely separate from Xbox… No one knew what was going on, and so there were no answers. It was a real challenge just syncing all that stuff up together [by ourselves]. I could not give enough kudos to the technical team that pulled that off. It was nothing short of a fucking miracle.”
Kazdal is careful with his words when talking about Microsoft, mindful not only of alienating a potential future partner, but of what happened after the game shipped and Pfeifer struck out on his own. Then he lashed out, describing 17-Bit’s publisher in one interview as “institutionally incompetent” and saying he would “like to go back in time and kick myself in the balls. I’d like the last year-and-a-half of my life back.” Kazdal couldn’t stop him; Pfeifer had been working as an independent contractor. All the boss could do was apologise after the fact. He did.
“When I joined, I could see the pain they’d gone through with Microsoft,” studio director Raj
Joshi tells us. He was another former colleague of Kazdal’s at EA in Los Angeles, brought in
after Kazdal realised he needed help with the day-to-day running of the studio, its people and projects and processes. Joshi made two promises to Kazdal. First, he’d find a way to ensure Skulls
Of The Shogun brought in more revenue (it has since spread from Microsoft platforms to Steam, PS4, Android and iOS). Secondly, he’d work out how to get him, and the studio, to Japan.
Joshi joined during development of Galak-Z, a breezy space shooter with procedural elements that, like Skulls before it, riffed on genre traditions in smart little ways. “I just came to give them a budget and a timeline,” Joshi says. “I had no intention of joining. But I was so impressed with the team, and the creative vision. Jake knew exactly what he wanted for the game, and he was doing everything. He was running the studio, creative direction, art direction, working with everyone on the team, just working his butt off. You could see the gaps – one person can’t do everything – but I was so impressed with his demeanour, the vision and the product.”
Kazdal’s all-encompassing management style might have worked for Skulls Of The Shogun’s small team. But headcount was creeping up, and it was no longer sustainable. “Before it was just me and a couple of programmers, and a couple of friends, but we were really bad at planning. We just winged everything,” Kazdal says. “We have ideas, we have talent; we have a great vision and a great team. But we didn’t have a producer, a budgeter, a scheduler. That’s why I convinced Raj to come and work with us. We needed a big boy to come in and look at all this stuff. You don’t want me in charge of scheduling or budgeting, because I’ll just be like, ‘When it’s awesome is when it’s done’. That’s not realistic.”
Change comes slow, however. Galak-Z was another difficult project for the team, and one of the major complicating factors was Kazdal finally getting his move to Japan. He left around a year before the game shipped. “We learned a lot of hard lessons on Galak-Z,” Joshi says. “Because of the time difference, he and I would spend two to four hours a day just talking over Skype, trying to figure stuff out. But we would have to make a lot of decisions in Seattle that he wasn’t necessarily privy to, which would have the best interests of the game in mind, but were not necessarily his vision. And some of that vision had not been detailed out and communicated to the team. That’s what delayed the game.”
The answer, as you might have guessed, is to make sure Kazdal writes everything down, even though the vast majority of the team is now based in Kyoto alongside him. The studio puts more emphasis on planning, spending more time in that bedroom-turned-boardroom to ensure problems can be seen coming in advance, and dealt with accordingly, before a line of relevant code is written.
That’s especially important
given the sharp creative turns the studio seems fond of making. Its most recent project was bringing
Galak-Z to mobile and Switch with a new publisher, GungHo Online Entertainment, maker of Puzzle & Dragons, and turning a paid-for PC and console game into a free-to-play mobile one. In fact, the original plan was for the game to be sold for a flat fee, but GungHo CEO Kazuki Morishita convinced them otherwise, assuring them he’d coach them through the process. While Morishita these days is the CEO of a company with a market cap of over ¥200 billion, he was part of the original Puzzle & Dragons design team. During contract negotiations, Kazdal and Joshi secured a clause stipulating they would meet with Morishita once a month.
It turned out he also liked console games. “When we went for our first fancy dinner with him, it was me and him in this chauffeured car going to dinner in Ginza and I asked him what other mobile games he liked. He said, ‘Actually, I mostly play Assassin’s Creed, Call Of Duty, Halo’ – those kind of hardcore western action games. He’s kind of a kindred spirit, though he’s the CEO of this gigantic, multizillion-dollar corporation and I run a 13-man show here. But we really got along, and I appreciated spending time with him, digging this stuff out of him.”
How successful that endeavour was remains to be seen; the game has just launched when we visit, and the mobile market is more about its tail than its head. But it’s clear the studio has learned a lot from the project, just as it has learned from everything it’s made. The team are now in fresh ground once again, as the morass of VR headsets and cabling around the studio makes clear. It’s a creatively fulfilling way to run a studio, sure – but also one that seems unlikely to ever make too much money. Kazdal seems fine with it. “The size we’re at is a sweet spot – we’ve got enough people to do some cool stuff, but also few enough to be lean and nimble to survive the tougher times. I wake up every day excited to come to work. That’s priceless.”
“WE HAVE A GREAT VISION AND A GREAT TEAM. BUT WE DIDN’T HAVE A PRODUCER, A BUDGETER, A SCHEDULER”