Excerpt: The Proverbial Blizzard of the Gaming Industry

(Source: IndianNoob)

Below is an excerpt from my book, How Games Get Made: The Stories of the People Who Make and Play the Games We Love, publishing December 7, 2020. This excerpt is part of an article series I am writing to raise awareness for my book and get you excited to read it! For more information, check out the end of this article.

Hidetaka Miyazaki didn’t start off as a rich man, by any means. He grew up poor in a city called Shizuoka, 100 miles south of Tokyo, Japan. Young Miyazaki would often visit his local library to find stories he could read to entertain himself for free.

“It was a rich reading experience… I found so much joy in those stories,” Miyazaki said in a rare profile interview with The Guardian. The Japanese don’t often do profile interviews: it’s considered a bit arrogant to consider yourself important enough to be interviewed, especially if the questions asked concern your life before you became famous. Sometimes the books he read were in English, and he’d use his imagination to fill in gaps in the plot that he did not understand.

Miyazaki also lacked passion as a child. “Unlike most kids in Japan, I didn’t have a dream,” he described. Without motivation to drive him towards a particular career, he moved through life aimlessly.

By the time Miyazaki was an adult, he was just another student studying the social sciences at Keio University — albeit a prestigious university. Though he contemplated game development during his college years, he ended up becoming just your average businessman in Japan; a “salaryman”, as it’s called in Japanese culture. He worked at the American IT company, Oracle Corporation, based in Japan. He balanced numbers and money in accounts dispassionately but without complaint.

As the years carried on, his job wore down on him. He was approaching his late 20’s and his position at Oracle was looking more like a dead end job without a chance at promotion. In Japan, you traditionally stick with one company from the moment you’re hired out of college; missing opportunities of promotions is equivalent to being told you’ll be a deadbeat for the rest of your life.

But then Miyazaki began to play some games with friends again in his late 20’s. They played Ico (2001), a fantastical escape adventure game, making their way through castles from ghastly villains. And Miyazaki realized: “I wanted to make one myself.” He loved the theme of fantasy, how far away from our world the game seemed. He wanted to create something similar.

The only problem with finding a new job was that he’d spent nearly a comfortable decade at his IT job: at the time, being 29 years-old, he was too old to apply for graduate studies in game development. On top of that, for Miyazaki to consider leaving a comfortable, stable IT job in Japan was unheard of.

Still, Miyazaki applied for jobs exclusively in the game development industry, hoping anywhere would take him. Eventually, after some searching, Miyazaki happened upon FromSoftware, a game company. He began in 2004 as a programmer.

Over the next few weeks, I’m going to be sharing excerpts from my book, How Games Get Made: The Stories of the People Who Make and Play the Games We Love, as well as thought pieces and deep dives in the format of an article series. How Games Get Made launches on December 7, 2020 on Amazon (link coming soon)! If you want to connect, you can reach me via Twitter: @emschaale!