When the subject of legendary Japanese game developers comes up, one name who absolutely
must be in the conversation is PlatinumGames
co-founder Hideki Kamiya. As the director of
undeniably classic games like Resident Evil 2 and
the original Devil May Cry, as well as more recent modern classics like Okami and Bayonetta, Kamiya's legacy and influence
in the world of action games - specifically character action games - is completely unparalleled. One only needs to look
at this photo of Kamiya as a young man standing next to his mother to know that there's never really been anyone quite like him, in
or outside of video games. But one of the things that
makes Kamiya so legendary and one of my personal
favorite things about him is his Twitter account @pg_kamiya. Specifically, his relationship
with Twitter's block feature. Now, to call Kamiya a prolific Twitter user is almost kind of an understatement - the man averages nearly
60 Twitter posts per day, occasionally going up
into the high 400 range, and at the time of this
video's publication, Kamiya is actually right on the verge of posting his 200,000th tweet. And out of those tweets, a very, very, VERY large chunk of them contain one key phrase: "Blocked." Now, blocking someone on Twitter is effectively the nuclear option. It makes it so a person can no
longer reply to your tweets, search for your tweets or
even look at your tweets. And for most Twitter users, blocking someone tends to
be sort of a last resort. Kamiya, on the other hand,
uses blocking differently - he blocks virtually everyone: fans of his games, other game developers, journalists, his own followers, even people who asked him a question that he's already answered elsewhere. Basically, by sending a tweet to Kamiya, you run the risk of him
being annoyed by it, and there's a very very very high chance he'll block you for it. And what's special about Kamiya
is that, more often than not, he won't simply block an offending user - he will do it publicly
in the form of a manual old-fashioned quote retweet
where he says "Blocked," and then copies and pastes your tweet into the following text behind an RT, basically turning your crappy tweet into a spectacle for his
100,000+ followers to laugh at. Now as you might have guessed, people have occasionally tried
to troll Kamiya intentionally over the years to get blocked by him. But often this backfires,
leading to Kamiya just deftly disposing of these people in a
spectacularly public fashion. One of my favorite examples of this is when someone once told Kamiya he couldn't make a good game if he tried, to which Kamiya responded:
"And what can you make? Poop everyday? Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha (inhale) ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha (inhale) ha ha." Another one of Kamiya's
magnificent public executions came after a Twitter user asked him, "Do you feel disappointed about having "developed Bayonetta 2
for inferior hardware?" to which Kamiya replied, "Isn't your mom disappointed
with her inferior son?" In fact, Kamiya eventually
grew so infamous for his reputation for powerful English language
comebacks on Twitter, that it actually crept back around into the world of video games. For years, one of Kamiya's
favorite replies to questions he didn't feel like answering
was, quote, "ask your mom." He deployed this reply hundreds
and hundreds of times on Twitter, often in reply to fans
asking whether or not he'd ever want to see
his character Bayonetta in Super Smash Bros. This made it immensely satisfying after Bayonetta was
announced as a DLC fighter for Super Smash Bros for Wii U, and the trailer included a
line where Bayonetta says this: "If you need to learn
how to talk to a lady, ask your mom." - a direct reference to Kamiya's tweets that was both in this trailer and in her in-game taunt. But at the end of day, it's
not his snarky replies, it's his reputation for blocking people that raised Kamiya's
Twitter status to legendary. And interestingly, you don't
even have to be trolling to end up blocked by Kamiya. Indeed, it appears that many of the people who end up blocked by him were
sincere fans of Kamiya's work asking him an innocent - if
possibly annoying - question. When it comes to who
Kamiya decides to block, it appears that intent doesn't
even enter into the equation. All that matters is if Kamiya
found your tweet irritating. And I think there's something
kind of admirable about that. Here's a few examples: You say you love one of his games? Blocked. Ask him to quit blocking people? Blocked. Ask him a question he's answered before or a dumb question or a joke question, or even just leave him tagged in your conversation with a friend? Blocked. Blocked. You're all blocked. None of you are free of sin. Now the obvious question here is: why? Why is Kamiya so generous with
his use of the block button? I've been looking into this
for a while and, interestingly, it appears that Kamiya was not
always this way on Twitter. If you go back through
all of Kamiya's tweets and look at the very first time he ever used the word 'blocked' in a tweet, it was seven years ago in August 2012, when somebody asked him if he'd ever blocked
somebody for being annoying. His reply, ironically
enough, was, quote: "Never. Basically, I don't want to do that." (laughing) That was in 2012. And looking forward just
two short years later, Kamiya had transformed into the block-loving Kamiya that
we know and love today, blocking people for all
their annoying questions, calling then insects and brainless idiots. Just the classic Kamiya. So what happened? How did Kamiya go from a guy who never wanted to block anyone to one of the most prolific blockers in the history of Twitter? Now, usually, we would just
have to speculate about this, but in 2015, Kamiya succinctly explained his exact reason why he
blocks so aggressively in the form of a four panel
comic he personally illustrated. In the first panel of the comic, we see a dumb-looking, slack-jawed boy, snot hanging out of his nose, wearing a shirt labeled "---- Poster", in front of a computer
with Twitter on his screen. In the second panel,
the boy recklessly slams both of his hands onto his keyboard, mashing out the question, "Fav game?". In the third we see the boy's
question fly out of his house in the form of an enormous red arrow. And then in the final panel, we see dozens and dozens of similar, actually identical, arrows
flying from all over the world, all converging on the
Osaka Prefecture of Japan, where PlatinumGames is headquartered. Now as funny as this comic is, it also gives us an
unprecedented bit of insight into Kamiya's relationship with Twitter. See, from the perspective
of the kid in the cartoon, he's just asking an innocent
and well-intentioned, if very unoriginal, question to one of his
favorite game developers. But from Kamiya's perspective, this is a question that he's
been asked 100s of times, a question he's been inundated with basically every day for years; and just one question of many that he's absolutely tired of fielding. See, I love this comic because it points to a fundamental flaw in the way Twitter works
for public figures. Anyone with a sizeable Twitter following knows what it's like to get the same questions over and over, but to me the fascinating part of this is Kamiya himself and his unique zero-tolerance response to this problem. I sincerely believe that
there is nobody else on earth who uses Twitter in quite
the way Kamiya does. Take, for example, his follow list. Kamiya only follows one person, and that's Japanese model Maho Hashimoto, who once cosplayed Kamiya's
character Bayonetta at the premiere of the
Bayonetta animated movie. Somebody once asked Kamiya "why do
you only follow one account?" and Kamiya replied, quote, "Cuz polygamy is prohibited in Japan". The perfect answer. And just in case it isn't clear by now: I absolutely adore the
way Kamiya uses Twitter. To me, it feels as though Kamiya has this very singular idea of how
Twitter ought to work, and any time he encounters any friction between his idea of what Twitter should be and what Twitter actually is, he just insists on his
version of the website, and then bends the product to his will in order to accommodate him. One fantastic example of
this is Kamiya's usage of a third party website called Twilog. Now, at first, Kamiya would actually answer repeat questions from time to time, although in a somewhat angry way, as seen in this tweet,
quote, "As I've said "one hundred thousand billion billion billion billion "billion billion billion times, "I hate horror games/movies
cuz scary and grotesque." Eventually, though, in
Kamiya's ongoing effort to combat the 'repeated questions' problem, he decided he would demand
that people search through all of his old tweets before
ever asking him anything. Now, because Twitter's
built-in search function is so janky and inconsistent, Kamiya decided to use a third-party Japanese Twitter-searching
service called Twilog, and required one to search
it before sending a message. And to spread the word about this policy, Kamiya would frequently tweet
something to the effect of, "REPEAT: check my twilog
before asking something." Kamiya would tweet this
message every day for years, all in a effort to just not see the same questions over and over. But, sadly, it made no difference. Kamiya once lamented the
state of his Twitter replies thusly: quote, "I wonder why I get lots of ---- posts everyday in spite of being
the cutest and politest guy in a galaxy who makes
viewtiful and wonderful games". See, the very things that annoy
Kamiya most about Twitter - being asked repetitive
questions, being trolled, people having 50 / 60 / 100
tweet-long conversations that they refuse to untag you from - these are things that most public figures have just accepted over time as unfortunate shortcomings
of the Twitter platform. But instead of just
ignoring these problems like the rest of us, Kamiya takes a much more active approach, wielding the block button like a weapon blocking everybody who violates his rules, and actively purifying the platform until all that remains is his personal ideal vision of Twitter. Or, as Kamiya once wrote
in 2014 after going on a particularly intense blocking spree: "Now my timeline becomes immaculate". Kamiya has been at this
for a long time now. As best I can tell, he first
began publicly announcing his blocks roughly five or so years ago, and the entire time I've been
following him on Twitter, I've been haunted by a singular question. Exactly how many people
has Hideki Kamiya blocked? This question has consumed me for years, in large part because the answer is just completely unknowable to
anybody except Kamiya himself. The way Twitter is set
up means that the size of an individual user's block
list is private information, and is completely invisible to everyone but the account holder themself. The only clue that
Kamiya has ever given us as to the size of his block
list was once in 2014, he mentioned that it was
more than 101 people, an oblique reference to his Wii U game, the Wonderful 101 - and also
a surprisingly low number that has no doubt grown
quite a bit since 2014. Over the years I've come up
with a few different techniques that we could possibly try to find out the size of Kamiya's block list. One of my early ideas was to
just count every single time he ever tweeted the word 'blocked' to try to conjure up a rough estimate. But Kamiya himself has said that sometimes he'll get bored of writing the
word 'blocked' over and over, and will simply block people in silence without announcing it. So that number would be useless to us. My second idea was to
simply send Kamiya a tweet asking him how many people
he's blocked on Twitter. And, as it turns out, I am not the first
person to have this idea. Over the years, multiple
individuals have tried to figure out the size
of Kamiya's block list, usually by asking him
directly over Twitter if they can just see it, and... I think you can guess
what his response was. "I'm just wondering how many
people you have blocked." "Blocked." "How many people are in your block list?" "Blocked." "Can you show us your block list?" "Blocked." "Is there any way to
screenshot your block list? "I'm curious how many people are on it." "Including you?" "Thanks, idiots, for feeding
my block list... colon D." (chuckling) Now the way I see it, these people who were
slain in the line of duty while valiantly trying to uncover this coveted piece of info are heroes - they all died, uh, in an honorable way... at the hands of Kamiya's block... hammer. But I've always personally
been careful to avoid ever tweeting directly at Kamiya, so as to not meet the same fate as those who fell before me. I am, as of the time of recording, not blocked by Kamiya on Twitter... let's see if that changes after this video, who can say what's gonna happen. But! I found myself in
a real predicament here, because the only person who can
answer this burning question was Kamiya himself, but I also knew that if I tweeted at him, that would end my five year
streak of remaining unblocked. I had to come up with
some way to ask Kamiya how many people he'd blocked, but asking him over the internet
was simply not an option. So, slowly, I realized there
was only one solution here... and that would be to ask
Hideki Kamiya in person. Having run out of options and desperate for some sort of resolution, I knew what I had to do. So I booked a plane ticket and got on my flight to
Tokyo in search of answers. After a grueling 12-hour flight - which, mercifully, I was asleep for most of - our plane finally touched down at Tokyo's Haneda International Airport, and from there, I actually had yet another plane ride ahead of me. So I took a short bus
ride from Haneda Airport's international terminal
to the domestic terminal, and then boarded yet another airplane, this time to Osaka. A plane which - incidentally,
I feel I should mention - was Star Wars-themed, for some reason. (C-3PO speaking
Japanese) Anyways, soon enough, I found myself arriving in Japan's Kansai region. Upon arriving in Osaka, I paused briefly to regain my composure, and also to admire this
gachapon / vending machine hybrid that was painted
to look like a train that they had waiting at
the Osaka train station which, by the way, upon examination, exclusively sold merchandise
themed around this character Madoka Toyokawa, who is the Osaka railway
anime girl mascot. ...thought that was worth mentioning. Anyways, the reason I was
at the Osaka train station is because I still had
one more ride ahead of me, an hour-long train ride
from Osaka to Kyoto, until finally, at long last, I arrived at my Airbnb and just collapsed. Now if you're wondering why
my final destination was Kyoto and not Osaka where
PlatinumGames is headquartered, there's a very good reason for that. See, every summer in Kyoto, Japan, there's a small independent
game festival called BitSummit, where both Japanese and
international game developers gather to show off the games
they've been working on to both the press and the public. But the 2019 BitSummit festival
had one major difference from all the years prior: this year, for the first time ever, PlatinumGames would be having
a booth at the festival where they would be selling exclusive PlatinumGames merchandise, some of which was previously
only available to PG staffers. Now the scary thing about this was that, as best as I could tell, Kamiya never said
conclusively whether or not he would be in attendance
at BitSummit 2019. In the weeks leading up
to this year's festival, Kamiya heavily promoted the
PlatinumGames' BitSummit booth, retweeting at least a dozen tweets about the company's presence
at the festival - which, you could argue, sort of
implies he'd be in attendance... but, then again, anyone who
follows Kamiya on Twitter know that the man loves to
retweet virtually anything, especially things
related to PlatinumGames, so, ultimately, I had no way
of knowing whether or not Kamiya would actually be there. All I could do was cross my
fingers and hope for the best. (footsteps pounding pavement) (car driving past) The next day, I woke up in Kyoto and, with a couple of hours to go before the beginning of BitSummit, I began looking for some
sort of distraction. I was really struck by how
beautiful the city of Kyoto was - I'd barely ventured outside of Tokyo in all my trips before this, and I was surprised by just
how much I loved this city. I spent the whole morning
just strolling around, visiting temples and coffee shops, and it was a surprisingly
effective distraction from what was to come. But before long, I knew that day 1 of
BitSummit was beginning, and it was time for my
mission to truly begin. I arrived at the Miyako
Messe Convention Center, scenically located on the
beautiful Lake Biwa Canal, with the picturesque backdrop of the Daimonji mountain range behind it, and I began my trek into the expo hall. Now, remember: this was my first BitSummit - my first time ever in Kyoto - and this festival was unlike anything I had ever seen before. It was a massively packed show floor, where small doujin games by
indie Japanese developers shared floor space with large booths from companies like Nintendo and Sony. I walked a quick lap around
the BitSummit show floor, and at first, PlatinumGames
was nowhere to be found, and I began to actually worry. I thought to myself: had
I somehow misunderstood? My mind flooded with irrational thoughts. Had the language barrier
gotten the better of me? And had I somehow
accidentally looked at the map from a previous year's BitSummit? And it was right as that panic
started to really set in, right as I was walking past the PlayStation booth for the first time, that I spotted it: the PlatinumGames booth. And standing in front of that booth, I saw something that I never thought I would get the opportunity
to lay my own two eyes on, an unmistakable neon
orange bandana that belongs to none other than the
likes of Hideki Kamiya. I had found him. Having set my sights on my target, there was still one major
obstacle that I had to clear, and that was the language barrier. I don't speak a word of Japanese,
and this was a relatively sophisticated question I had to ask him. This is where one of the greatest miracles of this journey transpires: incredibly, there was
one thing about BitSummit that I had not realized before arriving, which was that, because it's
a very international event, the festival actually employs a stable of English to Japanese interpreters to help the media conduct interviews. As luck would have it, just a few feet from
the PlatinumGames booth, I found a small group of BitSummit staff, one of whom was wearing a
lanyard marked 'interpreter.' I approached them and I told the interpreter
what I had in mind, laying out the exact
question I had for Kamiya, and what I was hoping to accomplish here, and, thankfully, she agreed to help. Together, this interpreter and I walked towards the PlatinumGames booth - and towards Kamiya - and I honestly had no clue
what would happen next. I had seen how quickly
Kamiya had dispensed of those who'd asked to see his block list before, and I began to feel certain that I had traveled all this way for no reason, and that Kamiya would meet my request with a simple "no." The translator explained
to Kamiya what I was asking in Japanese and then... (speaking in Japanese) "Wowwwwwww! Amazing! Wow, thank you so much. That's so cool to see it! Thank you, Kamiya-san. Thank you so much." There it was. Kamiya's block list
contained 17,398 people. I thanked Kamiya for his time, I thanked the interpreter for her time... and I walked away. I was shellshocked. Not only because I had just
become the first person on earth that Hideki Kamiya had ever revealed this forbidden number to, but also by just the
sheer size of that number. Seventeen thousand... three hundred... and ninety-eight. The number rattled around in my head. I struggled to grapple
with the scale of it. If you will, allow me to put this number - 17,398 - into perspective. I want you to picture
Radio City Music Hall, the largest indoor theater in the world. I want you to imagine
filling Radio City Music Hall completely to its maximum capacity. No empty seats - a fully sold-out, jam-packed show. Now, I want you to imagine doing
that... three times in a row. That is how many people
Hideki Kamiya has blocked, one person at a time, manually by hand, on his Twitter account. That is a mind-blowing number. For the entire rest of my trip in Kyoto, I continued to grapple with this incident. What drives a man, I wondered,
to block 17,000 people? Something about it felt incongruous with the man I had just met. I mean, however brief my interaction with Kamiya was that day, I found him to be warm and friendly - nothing at all like the acerbic character he plays on Twitter. So then: why is Kamiya's
Twitter the way that it is? Why spar with trolls and
block people en masse? Ultimately, there's only one person who knows the true answer to that question and that is obviously Kamiya himself, but... personally, I have my own theory. It's only very recently
that we've begun to have serious conversations about the toll social media can have on mental health, particularly for people
who live their lives in the public eye. Every public figure
with an online presence has to deal with some form
of abuse from strangers. And we're told over and over that it comes with the territory, that it's just part of the job, that we're better off just ignoring it and never feeding the trolls. But the wonderful thing
about Hideki Kamiya is that he doesn't accept that. When I look at Kamiya's Twitter, I see a man fiercely defensive of the one small corner of the internet that is entirely his - a man who won't let himself be dehumanized by people who would never say these types of things to him in person. The thing about Kamiya is that, whether it's people actively trolling him or even just asking him
thoughtless questions, he never holds back. He says exactly what he's
thinking on Twitter at all times, and unflinchingly curates
his online experience until all that's left is the good parts - hence "my timeline becomes immaculate". And while people understandably gravitate towards Kamiya's more combative tweets when discussing his internet presence, there's also another side to the man that often goes completely ignored. My favorite example of
this comes from 2017, when news broke that
Kamiya's Xbox-exclusive game Scalebound had suddenly been canceled partway through development. By all accounts, Scalebound
was a really big deal for Kamiya personally - he'd first established
the concept for Scalebound over a decade ago back in 2006 alongside PlatinumGames' co-founders, and this was set to be the first game Kamiya had been in the director's seat for since 2013's Wonderful 101. Scalebound was a game that Kamiya sank at least four years
into the development of - so when the game's
cancellation was announced, it wasn't surprising that Kamiya took to Twitter to discuss it. But... what was surprising was that instead of his signature anger, Kamiya took to Twitter with
a heartwarming apology. "As you may have already heard, Scalebound has unfortunately
been canceled," he wrote. "I'm very sorry to everyone who was looking forward to this game. I'll work extra hard to never
let you down like this again, so I hope you will keep watching over us in the future too." Immediately after posting this message, Kamiya was swarmed with
supportive, positive, loving messages from fans, and an hour later, Kamiya
posted one last tweet to share his final message of the day. "I thought I would get
lots of savage messages, but in reality I'm getting
lots of warm messages. Thank you." Followed by a crying kaomoji - which I think it's fair to say is a pretty rare sight from Kamiya. Now this moment is obviously touching, but I think it also represents the thing that we find so appealing about Kamiya, and that's his vulnerability. Whether it's cruel messages from strangers trying to hurt his feelings or messages of support from fans during one of the hardest
moments in his entire career, Kamiya always responds wholeheartedly. It appears to be just who he is. While working on this video, I reviewed the footage of my
encounter with Hideki Kamiya, and the last time I looked,
something jumped out at me that I hadn't spotted
the first time through. If you look closely, at
the very end of the clip, right after Kamiya shows me his
block list of 17,000 people and right after I tell
him that it's amazing, in the upper left corner of the screen, for exactly one frame... Kamiya smiled. He was proud. At the end of the day, I think Kamiya's Twitter fascinates us because there is something beautiful about watching somebody
unapologetically be themselves. Or, as Kamiya himself once said, "You gotta be you. "Only one in the world." Real quick, I would like to thank this video's sponsor, OnePlus. Now if you haven't heard of it, the OnePlus 7 Pro is this really really insanely fast and powerful Android phone with a Snapdragon 855 processor and up to 12 gigabytes of RAM. Also, if you're anything like me, and you're picky about framerate, the OnePlus 7 Pro has a
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Who is this guy?