An Audience With…
The Sega veteran and reformed club kid on the thrills of chasing the unknown
Sega veteran and reformed club kid Jake Kazdal on the thrills of chasing the unknown
Jake Kazdal is the founder, creative director, art director based career, these working and days CEO for in of Tetsuya Kyoto, indie he’s studio Mizuguchi had 17-Bit. a peripatetic in Tokyo While during Spielberg the in Dreamcast Los Angeles, era, with then a brief under sojourn Steven in Seattle before he found his way back to Japan once more. In a way, the stamps in his passport mirror the fortunes of Japan’s game industry; he was in Tokyo when the country was still the planet’s creative fulcrum, then moved to the US west coast just as it rose to dominance. Now he’s back in Japan, and the industry there is, if not fully recovered, then certainly on the mend. Here, over a curry in a Kyoto food court, he reflects on a fascinating career, and looks forward to something potentially even better.
You started working for Sega Japan in the late ’90s. What was it like back then?
It was a new beginning. It was right at the start of the Dreamcast. Sega had some pretty radical vision for how to rebrand itself as not just a hardcore gamer machine. The Mega Drive was this black, sleek, cool-looking machine. The Dreamcast was designed to be very friendly and approachable. It was much more SuperFamicom-inspired: the bright colours, the light ding, the happy little logo. [Tetsuya] Mizuguchi-san had been tasked at the time to create this new division that was trying to do more experimental stuff, new stuff, to try to appeal to a broader audience.
It was a super-exciting time. When I got there, the Dreamcast had just shipped in Japan, and everything was just, like, pure potential. Up until that point, teams were smaller, they were flexible, the budgets were smaller, the turnaround time was quicker. The PS1 era was full of great, weird, Japanese quirky stuff that was all pretty low-budget. Yeah, there was Final Fantasy and some bigger-budget stuff, Metal Gear and things like that. But if you look at the mass of the catalogue, there was a lot of fun, interesting little projects. ‘What’s a 3D game? We don’t know! Let’s try this, let’s try that.’
Now we were moving into the next generation. The hardware was more powerful and teams were getting bigger. In Japan there was not much industrial knowhow of higher resolutions. The west had already been doing more powerful PC games; they had more of a lexicon for how to handle high-end 3D graphics. As budgets got bigger these guys were like, ‘Whoa’. All of a sudden they’re in this big ship, and have never been in a storm like this before. I think that was when they started to get left behind – to get outmatched by the west, particularly the British, American and Canadian stuff.
Western developers tend to be much more open when it comes to their information and tech. Is Japan’s industry as secretive as it’s portrayed to be?
Any big western studio would be, like, ‘Hey, we spent all this time and money building a new engine, let’s get as many people using this thing as we can’. Whereas every Japanese team I know from back then made a custon engine for every game, every time. If you really want to be able to manage the fine details of everything, it makes sense. But the amount of lost productivity is just staggering.
You grew up in the US, playing Japanese games. Did that change once you moved to Japan?
I’d been playing Japanese games my whole life. But I noticed a shift in my gaming habits once I moved. I was playing a lot of WipeOut and Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater. I was playing SSX, GTAIII and Halo. I was like, ‘I’ve never played this many western games before’. There was nothing that was particularly interesting to me at the time that was being made in Japan.
What was the social scene back then? Did Japanese studios keep themselves to themselves?
A big part of my community was Sega people, obviously. But my best friend worked for Namco, and I made friends with quite a few of those guys. One of my good buddies was at Polyphony [Digital], so I hung out with those guys – they were hard partiers, too, they used to be at a lot of the trance parties we went to. [ Nier:
Automata director] Yoko Taro used to work at Namco, and he was part of our crew too. I also had friends at Activision and Inis, and Mizuguchi-san had a very wide circle of friends.
It was pretty social. I was young, I was a big club kid, and the music scene was amazing. Mizuguchi-san’s the nicest guy you’ll ever meet, and spending time with him, going out to all these events and getting introduced to cool people, was amazing. It was a brilliant time, and the perfect time to be doing it. I was in my late 20s and had
“IT WAS A SUPEREXCITING TIME. THE DREAMCAST HAD JUST SHIPPED IN JAPAN, AND EVERYTHING WAS JUST PURE POTENTIAL”
no responsibilities. I miss part of that in Tokyo, but now I’m married, I have two kids – it would almost be worse to be up there now because you have all this stuff, like, teasing you. Kyoto’s the right speed.
There are plenty of legends about staff working right through the night in those days. How does that tally up with a thriving club scene?
My friend Nana [Takamasa Shichisawa] was one of the art directors on Gran Turismo. Those Polyphony guys worked so hard. They were always at work. They had these beautiful offices – they had dorms, showers, a gym, a library. We’d be two or three hours out of Tokyo in the countryside, doing some trance party all weekend. He’d show up at midnight on Friday or Saturday, party until seven in the morning and be like, ‘Well, gotta go back to work. I just wanted to come out and say hi’. I was like, ‘This is not something I can comprehend.’
It sounds like an amazing time, but four-and-a-halfyears after moving out to Japan, you decided to move back to the US. What happened?
UGA [Mizuguchi’s Sega division United Game Artists] was a magical group of people. There were a couple of great years where things were just awesome: everything we were doing was cutting-edge and totally unproven, unseen, unknown. They were amazing, passionate years, working under this crazy, influential leader where everyone believed in what we were doing. I got addicted to it. But the games didn’t perform super-well financially, and there was some restructuring within Sega. All those studios that were technically their own company – Sega Rosso, Smilebit, Nagoshi-san’s division, Amusement Vision – were folded back in. Rez didn’t sell well, on first release, at all. Rez 2 didn’t get the green light, although it looked stunning. I wish I’d kept the pitch video because it was fucking amazing.
Takashi Yuda was starting this new character-based platformer for GameCube, and I moved onto the project. I was thrilled to work with him again: he’d been around since forever, created Space Channel 5 and Knuckles The Echidna, worked on Castle Of Illusion and all these classic games. He was like a hero of mine. We became good friends, and he was definitely my senpai, teaching me all this stuff.
We got up a lot of steam and made a really cool prototype. I don’t know why, but it didn’t make it out of the gate. We got moved onto an Astro Boy game. There was a new movie coming; there was a bunch of concept art for it, and we were just working to spec – ‘Okay, here’s what the movie looks like, make the game look like this’. All these people who’d been doing all this crazy, experimental, cutting-edge stuff were like, ‘Oh, now I’m just a production artist. Make x, make y, make z’. There was a rumour we were going to be absorbed by Sonic Team and Yuji Naka’s crew back at HQ in Haneda. A couple of the key guys, that had been the real creative geniuses on Rez and Space Channel 5, started leaving. You could tell the days of UGA were over.
It was sad. I was bummed. Some of my favourite senpais were leaving, and I was never a Sonic The
Hedgehog fan – I had no intention of joining that team. I was feeling kinda burned out; Tokyo lifestyle was starting to drag a little bit. And I could see there was a glass ceiling for a guy like me, who couldn’t read or write Japanese really. I wasn’t going to get a big promotion. I decided I wanted to go back to school.
I learned so much from the lead guys on Rez: they were geniuses. I came from a traditional animation background, I was more of a ‘wing it and see what happens’ kind of guy. But these guys had such process. I could see immediately that this was the only way to stay at the cutting edge. To be a professionally trained designer: not just an artist, but a designer with a clear set of goals and a process. I looked for the best design school I could find, and it was the Art Center in Pasadena, California. I got accepted. I went there, meaning to come right back.
But you went to work for EA. What happened?
Right before graduation I got offered a position on the
LMNO project, working directly under Steven Spielberg and an amazing team of concept artists at EA Los Angeles. I couldn’t say no. It was a detour, but it was very progressive, very inspiring and challenging. We were trying to do too much – I think that’s one of the reasons it didn’t make it, we were just overambitious. But that’s what game making is. It’s where I met my future partners in Skulls Of The Shogun, and where 17-Bit got started. Without it, I would never have got where I am now.
Now you’re back in Japan with your studio, 17-Bit. What’s the Japanese indie scene like?
It’s very international. I don’t know much of a thriving, super-crazy Japanese-only scene. Most of the smaller studios I know, a good percentage of them are foreigners – French, British, American, Canadian, Australian…
Is that a cultural thing? It’s a cliché, but there’s that image of the job for life, where you join Nintendo out of college and stay there until you retire.
Imagine you’re a young kid who goes to college, graduates and wants to be an engineer in games. Your parents and family are riding you to get a good job now you’re out of school. Somebody at Nintendo offers you a job, and of course you’re going to take it. And of course you’re going to stay there for life. And everyone’s going to go, ‘Yay! You did it!’ It’s hard for us, as a little indie
“WE ARE NOT GOING TO GET TO WHERE WE NEED TO GO IF PEOPLE AREN’T INSPIRED AND EXCITED TO COME TO WORK EVERY DAY”
studio, to say, ‘We’ve been down here for a couple of years now. Come join us!’
In the west, a lot of kids will graduate game school and go straight into their own indie studio. There have been plenty of success stories. But I always tell people, go get a job at a big corporation for a couple of years. Learn on someone else’s dime. Think of it as College 2.0, except you’re getting paid, probably a good salary, to learn the basics ins and outs of the whole process. Make connections and then go do your own thing. So what do you do when you need to hire? We’ve imported a couple of people from the States, but most of the guys here are long-time Kyoto guys. Most of them have worked together before at Vitei, which had worked with Nintendo directly for years, then lost the contract. I was only too happy to hire them. We’d just signed a deal and needed a bunch of senior engineers.
People here aren’t looking: they just don’t job hop the way they do in the west. Most of the guys that came in when I was at Sega are still there, 15 years later. This is, overall, the Japanese way of working. You get a good job somewhere, you stay there. It’s how society works. It’s changing: there’s nowhere near the same job security there used to be. But I wouldn’t suggest coming over here like, ‘I’m going to start a new company and get all these local guys to come join me’. That would be difficult.
We get a lot of resumés: ‘Hey, I love your games, I’ve been making games a long time, I’d love to move to Japan’. And we’ve gone through the process enough times – we know how to get the work visa and everything else – that we know how to get someone out here. But our headcount is low, we have an awesome staff, and we don’t need anyone. I keep the resumés, though.
You mentioned feeling burned out towards the end of your time at Sega. How has that affected the way you run your own studio?
After killing myself so much on Galak-Z and Skulls Of
The Shogun while my kids were little, I missed a lot of time with them. I made an executive decision to just not do that any more. I was building the company and every hour counted, but now, we don’t want to work crazy hours. It just isn’t worth it. People burn out, they get bitter, they get tired and make mistakes. We’re not going to get to where we need to go if people aren’t inspired and excited to come to work every day. I’ve seen the effects, and know what it does: at Sega we had some people who worked themselves to the bone and never recovered. That’s not something I can ever approve of, and of which I no longer wish to be part.
So we work smart. We come in, we work all day, and we go home. We plan everything. Raj [ Joshi, studio manager] and I are in our mid-40s. This is only through years of experience, and finally wrapping our heads round the whole thing. We can do it sustainably, and intelligently. It can be done.
Over the past couple of years Japan has been getting back to its best. What do you think is behind the turnaround in its games?
The PS3 era was a dark time for them. Now they’ve kinda got back to basics, doing what they do best, and have stopped trying to emulate the west – they aren’t trying to be Gears Of War. I don’t know that they’ll ever get back to the glory days, where everything that was amazing was coming out of here. And I still don’t play many Japanese games.
How come?
I don’t like thirdperson action games, that’s my problem. Except Zelda – I have no idea how they did it, but the camera doesn’t drive me nuts. Breath Of The Wild is probably my favourite game of all time, it’s fucking amazing. But for the most part I don’t like thirdperson games, so I just tend to play firstperson shooters, survival games, a lot of indie stuff. And VR took me very hard very early on, it’s a whole new medium that’s fascinating to me.
What is it about VR that so appeals to you?
It’s like I’ve been waiting for this thing my whole
“WE’LL LOOK BACK AT THIS GENERATION OF GAME-CREATING LIKE WE LOOK BACK AT THE FIRST-GEN N64 AND PLAYSTATION STUFF”
fucking life. There are a lot of new standards that are still to be defined in VR, and that’s super-exciting. It brings me back to the UGA years. I love not knowing exactly where we’re going, where it’s dangerous and thrilling and exciting, where everything you do leaves a mark, becomes a flagpost.
I think that, in hindsight, we’ll look back at this generation of game-creating like we look back at the first-gen N64 and Play Station stuff. It’s a massive paradigm shift, where old rules no longer apply and new standards are being defined. You see so many people coming out of film and moving into VR: ‘I’m tired of working at Pixar, working on shaders. How many more breakthroughs are we going to make?’ The language of film is so established, and has been for years. There’s nowhere to leave your mark. But VR is this wild west. And the more we can get ahead of the curve, get experienced and understand the core tenets of this new medium, the better off we’re going to be moving into the future.
You helped make Rez, and you’re clearly in love with VR. What did you make of Rez Infinite’s Area X?
Oh I have to tell you this story, it’s amazing. Mizuguchisan and I are still very close, and he’s working with Mark [Macdonald, Tetris Effect producer], who’s one of my favourite people in the world. They were planning this art book for Rez Infinite, and Mark knew I’d kept my old sketchbooks from the development of Rez. He asked if they could have them.
So I start looking. And I can’t find them anywhere. When I left Japan I threw all my shit in crates and sent it all back to the States. But I had this one box of sketchbooks and I was like, ‘This is the most precious thing to me. Everything else here can be replaced, but these cannot.’ I put them somewhere safe. And I didn’t see them again for 16 years.
They’re two weeks out from going to print. It’s PAX Prime in the fall of 2016, and I was staying at my dad’s house in Seattle for the summer, which I always do. He has this storage room, and every year he says, “I want to clear out that room and turn it into a bedroom.” He says it again, and I’m like, yeah, sure. He says, “I’m serious. I want your shit out of here. If it’s not out of there by the time you leave, I’m throwing it away.” It’s two days before I fly back to Japan.
I’m supposed to go to PAX that day. Mark’s like, “Come to the suite, check out Area X. We’re not announcing it yet, but you can come play it, spend time with me and Miz.” My dad’s going, “You’d better go down there and go through that stuff.” I go down there and I’m tearing through everything, and I open up this box.
There they are. All of them. And it’s not just my sketchbooks. It’s [Noboru] Hotta-san and [Yasuhiko] Matsuzaki-san, the two leads – the boss guy and the environment guy. They were going to throw their sketchbooks away and I was like, “Nonono! I’ll take it!” They gave me everything.
I’d already told Mark and Miz I couldn’t find the books, and they’re scrambling to get something else to fill the space. I go to their suite with this backpack, and I’m like, “Boom. I just found these things an hour ago.” They’re straight on the phone to Fangamer: “Stop the press! We have the art books!” They’re freaking out. Mizuguchi-san and I were looking back through these things with tears in our eyes. They’re memories: all these different iterations of all this cool stuff we did. It was an amazing day, and I was inspired already. And then I sat down and played Area X for the first time.
I’ve known this guy now for 20 years. He has never stopped talking about synaesthesia. He has never stopped being singularly focused on this sensation, this whole movement. His whole career is focused around that thing now. So to sit down and play that for the first time, to see how his vision has evolved, and how much closer we are to it… especially in VR, where you are in the sound, you are in the visuals, everywhere you look you are surrounded by everything that is that game. I cried. Like, ‘Fuck. This is what you’ve been about, for so long.’ It was awesome.
Was that what convinced you you needed to be making games in VR, or were you already on the path by then?
Well before then. We had the DK1 [the first Oculus Rift development kit] and there were no games, nothing available for it. One of our employees was a total hacker and was on Reddit just figuring everything out. We managed to hack Half-Life 2 and Left 4 Dead to be playable in VR. I put it on and I was in Left 4 Dead. All of a sudden zombies are running down the hall to me at
human scale, and my lizard brain is yelling at me, like, ‘Get the fuck out of here’. I took it off and was like, “VR is the future. This is going to change everything. This is fucking crazy. This is fucking crazy.”