State Of Art
JAKE KAZDAL RE-REZZES MEMORIES OF HIS DREAM JOB AT SEGA
As an artist, what were you responsible for in Rez?
I animated the main character and I designed the characters for the first and second stage. I also worked on the prototype of the first boss back when it was like this octopus-jellyfish, which turned into a much more abstract geometric thing. I actually translated the text into English for Area 5, but Yokota-san was the mind behind all that.
How did you manage to work in Japan without speaking any Japanese?
When I was working on Space Channel 5, the art director took me under her wing and she’d love to practise her English, so we kind of built a rapport, so I just kind of picked it up. I’d sit in design meetings taking notes, listening for words that I was hearing over and over again, and then bug teammates afterwards to help me figure these out, so I built my vocabulary from the ground up. I was also going out clubbing and meeting people on weekends, you’re just immersed in it, and you just pick it up before too long. I was definitely misunderstanding things, missing deadlines that someone had set, or I took the opposite of what somebody said. But people were super nice, super friendly and super accommodating.
As UGA was based in Shibuya, did you have much interaction with the rest of Sega HQ?
For the most part, we were pretty detached.
It’s kind of a bummer actually because I wanted to get to know more people. I found out years later, back when I had moved back to the States, there was another American guy there named Trevor Stricker who had been working on the Panzer Dragoon Orta team over at the Haneda office at the same time!
Your studio recently released its first VR game, but what was it like seeing Rez in VR for the first time?
Rez Infinite was super surreal because my whole relationship with these characters had been on a monitor about the size of a CRT that was split into four quadrants, and a little 3D view. To see these things now the size of a van whooshing over my head – I made that, my concept is suddenly 100 times bigger and you’re in the world – it totally blew me away. And part of what blew me away is just how timeless the art style was, it totally holds up.