Photo of Tokyo, circa 2010, taken by Sebastian Mayer.
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Month: January 2017
It’s become a tradition that at the start of every year, PechaKucha HQ sends out a massive newsletter looking back at the previous year and highlighting 20 achievements — I used to put these together along with the rest of the team. This year’s edition — which you can read online here — is a fantastic list of 20 things that PechaKucha was involved in, that helped make the world a better place. Very proud of my old PechaKucha family on this one.
I should have shared this much soon, as the deadline for submitting abstracts is just around the corner on February 1, but it’s not too late. Replaying Japan 2017: 5th International Japan Game Studies Conference looks like quite the intriguing gathering, taking place August 21-23 at the Strong National Museum of Play in Rochester. There were certainly some interesting talks at last year’s conference, and I wish the material was available online.
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Craig Mod’s Offline Directive
Paranoia Girls, an experimental illustrated story written by Parick Macias and drawn by Yunico Uchiyama is now being shared through Wattpad (it was running on Tumblr), and as they explain, “the text for Wattpad will contain revisions and should be considered a 2.0 version.”
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Kojima Productions, in Shinagawa
Kojima Productions now has its very own slick home in the Shinagawa part of Tokyo, and it recently shared a gallery of photos that show off the new digs (which I came across through this Kotaku post). IGN has posted a 5-minute video featuring interviews with Kojima and key staff talking about the studio, and how it all came together.
I’ve known Mike Sheetal for most of my life in Tokyo. One of the co-founders of the design/advertising agency UltraSuperNew, he switched gears a bit last year by founding a new game-oriented creative agency called Playbrain (bringing him back to his game dev roots). This week saw the launch of a new project by that agency, a game community site called Dekki. The site is still in its early stages, but is already home to a Hearthstone community, with more coming soon. They’re also producing two web shows on Twitch: Dekki World in Japanese and Dekki Does Japan in English.
Tokyo-based (well, mostly) Friend & Foe‘s Vane is a game I’m incredibly looking forward to playing when it comes out. They’ve just shared an interesting blog post on the experience they had showing the game at PSX, and how despite the hurdles, taking part in a show like that can be well worth it for devs.
Borderless Cafe is another site to add to your “Tokyo Cafe Hunting” folder — come on, we all have one, right? I especially like the posts under the “tokoyocoffeescene” tag. Thanks go out to Patrick Benny for the heads-up on this one.
Not only does the new Beams Beyond Tokyo book from Rizzoli look fantastic — a celebration of the brand’s collaborations through the years — I’m also happy to see that my buddy W. David Marx is one of the contributors. These Rizzoli coffee table books tend to be incredibly well made (oh, you know, like that Tokyolife: Art and Design book), and this looks like another one I’d love to pick up.