Max HP: Jake Kazdal, 17-Bit
Max HP: Jake Kazdal, 17-Bit
From Nintendo to Sega, Mizuguchi to Spielberg: a reflection on over 30 years of getting lost in the woods.
There are two kinds of game-developer origin story, largely separated by age. The younger crowd tend to have made a plan and executed it: a relevant college degree, perhaps a masters or MBA, then a graduate scheme, internship or associate role at a game studio, after which they work their way up the ladder. Those of a certain age, however, naturally predate all that. They got into the game industry long before there was any such thing as a career path into it. That is certainly the case for Jake Kazdal, CEO and creative director of Kyoto game studio 17-Bit, and the subject of today’s edition.
Don’t get me wrong: Jake would not be where he is today, or have enjoyed a career in games of over 30 years, without bucketloads of hard work and talent. But the route he has taken is just… different. Mad, even. I have done plenty of these kinds of interviews in my career and I have never heard a story quite like it. In fact, if I were to write it up as a biopic, I reckon the studios would reject it for being the stuff of fantasy.
Forgotten characters pop up years later with job offers. Seemingly innocuous decisions have life-changing consequences, and random workplace encounters lead to dream jobs based halfway round the world. Throughout, there is a near constant sense of someone being forever in the right place, at precisely the right time. Yes, this is a story of hard work, of chances bravely taken, of gambles paying off or falling apart. But it is also one of serendipity, of happenstance, of… I fumble around for the right word and Jake cuts in. “Dumb fucking luck.” Yes, that’ll do.
A case in point: Jake was born and raised in Washington state, near Seattle, which just so happened to be the nucleus of the US console-game industry in the late ‘80s. Nintendo was based in Redmond, just down the road from Seattle; after the NES exploded in popularity in the US and Japanese game companies realised they needed to set up overseas HQs, they figured they might as well be close to the mothership. Jake had no idea about any of this. He was just a kid who’d grown up playing arcade games in his parents’ pizza parlours, and then on his NES at home. But one day his best friend Theron Benson came over, all excited about his sister’s new job. “Dude,” Jake recalls him saying. “She got a job at Nintendo.”
Jake, like his friend, was obsessed with the NES, and couldn’t believe what he was hearing. Surely Nintendo came from Japan? Theron explained that it had a US office, a 15-minute drive away from their home town of Woodinville, Washington. “Well,” Jake said. “We gotta get jobs there.” There was one small problem: they were only 14, and you had to be 16 to legally work. And so on the morning of his 16th birthday Jake cadged a lift over to Volt, the temping agency that supplied Nintendo with short-term staff, and asked for a job.
There was an entrance exam, a filtering exercise to ensure applicants knew their Nintendo; he aced it. And so throughout his sophomore and junior years at high school, he worked four five-hour shifts a week, in the evenings and at weekends, as a Nintendo Game Counselor. He manned the phones for the premium-rate hotline that used to be printed in the back of NES game manuals. Back then, long before YouTube or even GameFAQs, it was pretty much your only option when you were stuck on a game and in a hurry to progress.
Even though this all took place over 30 years ago, I am screamingly jealous of Jake for getting to do this. The Game Counselors are featured in the Netflix documentary High Score — 16-year-old Jake, proto-mullet and all, appears twice in archive footage — and enjoyed a certain level of local celebrity thanks to their glossy, branded, ‘80s-oversized jackets which, the chap in the documentary admits, they often wore to the mall in hope of being recognised. They were getting paid to play games. They were offered a substantial staff discount on hardware and software. They had access to a complete library of NES titles that they were strongly encouraged to take home and play to further broaden their Nintendo knowledge. “They loved it if you were playing games all the time,” he says. Honestly, I’m bloody furious about it.
Jake remembers seeing a photo of a prototype Super Famicom in an issue of the US magazine EGM. NOA’s market share was enormous at the time, and since the entire concept of hardware generations had yet to be invented, the company was rather wary of upsetting the NES apple cart with the launch of a new console. In one weekly team meeting, Jake and his colleagues were told, in no uncertain terms, that NOA had no plans to bring the Super Famicom to the west. If anyone rang the hotline to ask about it, that was the line to take.
One day soon after, one of Jake’s early team leads, Paul Lange, stopped by his desk. Paul had been promoted into a product-analysis role in another part of the building, and said he had something to show Jake after his shift. “He comes and gets me and walks me down this hall,” Jake recalls. “My heart is already racing; this is the cool area of the building the Game Counselors aren’t allowed to go to.” Paul took out his keycard, opened a door, and Jake walked into a room in which 15 people were sitting around 15 Sony Trinitron TVs, playing 15 Super Famicoms. They were playing the NCL launch titles: F-Zero, Pilotwings and Super Mario World. “I just exploded. Honestly, it was one of the best days of my life.”
Jake spent his last Christmas bonus from Nintendo on a launch Super Famicom (“As soon as that thing launched, I had it in the mail”). This was long before he learned Japanese, and those of you of a certain vintage will know how hard it was to play import games in those days. Jake got horribly stuck in ActRaiser and figured his time with the game was over, until one day at work he noticed a Dragon Quest poster pinned up above a colleague’s desk. Not Dragon Warrior, the name under which Nintendo had published the first Dragon Quest in North America: actual Dragon Quest. He asked his colleague where he’d got it. “Oh, at Enix,” came the reply. “They’re just down the street.”
Enix! Enix made ActRaiser. Perhaps they could help. Jake drove over one day, walked up to the people at the front desk, and asked for some help with an unreleased Enix game that he’d imported from Japan. Astonishingly, they didn’t call security, but summoned their own version of a Game Counselor, who introduced himself as Robert Jerauld. Luckily, he’d been playing the game in preparation for its US launch, knew exactly the section Jake was stuck on, and gave him the advice he needed.
Before he left, Jake looked around the office. He saw copies of Famitsu magazine in racks on the walls, and meeting rooms stuffed with Dragon Quest paraphernalia. Nintendo was a Japanese company, but its US office didn’t feel much like it. This, though, “just reeked of Japanese game development. I was like, my god, I have to get a job here. This is even closer to the pulse.” He asked Rob on the spot; unfortunately they only had one Game Counselor position and Rob, as the incumbent, wasn’t about to give it to him. He suggested Jake check in every so often to see if anything had changed.
Jake quit Nintendo before his final year of high school — he wanted to focus on his studies, he tells me, though he also uses words like “partying” and “snowboarding” so, well, you know — but returned after graduation while he figured out what he wanted to do with his life. Before long, he enrolled at community college in Seattle.
He was late for his first day, which in our biopic analogy would surely be presented as some kind of dark portent — the Sliding Doors moment at which things take a turn for the worse. But had he been on time, Jake and I would be having a very different conversation, if we were even having one at all. As prerequisites for his studies, Jake had to take a history class and a language class. And since he was late, most of the classes were already at full capacity. He had no option but to study Japanese language, and Japanese history.
To his surprise, he loved them both. His history professor quickly spotted Jake’s aptitude and passion for the subject, so took Jake to one side and asked if he’d be interested in a student exchange program. Would he like to live in Kobe, Japan, for three months? Jake bit his hand off, naturally. He spent his time working on his spoken Japanese, falling in love with the country itself, and buying all the games and toys he could afford. When he came home at the end of it, he was sure of only one thing: somehow, some day, he’d be back.