Trolling Sony, Tricking the ESRB, and Horror Games: A Kenji Eno Story | Past Mortem [SSFF]

hey I'm Derek it's me Derek and this is stop skeletons and fighting it's Halloween Oh boop-boop toe burrow weenz Eve of the witch and if you've been a longtime viewer of this channel you know we always do Halloween videos and in fact you might remember some Halloween videos I made years ago for the quote/unquote D trilogy these are three fascinating flawed [ __ ] masterpieces as far as I'm concerned and hey shameless plug if you're watching this today on Wednesday October 9th we are celebrating October by streaming the first D on twitch.tv slash of stop skeletons and fighting at 6:00 p.m. Pt the first ever punching weight Wednesdays but that's on Twitch on this channel on YouTube we're gonna be honoring the man who helped bring these games to the world ken GNO a man whose name you probably don't know even if you are a hardcore horror fan but you should know because the development of these three games is absolutely legendary he heard about the time that enno managed to get dat 14 rating by sneaking in a violent cannibal storyline after deadline but about the time he burned no exploded a bridge with Sony at their own Expo or when he cornered acclaimed composer Michael Nyman in a hotel room for six hours until they finally agreed to write the music for enemy zero these are just a few of the legends surrounding Ken GNO and he did all this as an independent developer way back before indie development was viable like it is today it's still not very viable but you own transit but once you start to look at the rest of Anna's career outside of these anecdotes a different more nuanced picture emerges the full picture of the band is distorted by time language madness and his own death in 2013 at the age of only 42 Ken GNO was a creator who followed his convictions to their fullest extent even if he didn't fully understand where his convictions were coming from conventions be damned and he wanted you to notice welcome to past boredom where we break down and explore the stories of video games in this episode we're going to delve into the story of a Japanese game legend and one of the greatest horror game makers of all time Ken GNO ken GNO was born May 5th 1970 in arakawa Tokyo Japan he liked computers from a young age but his first love was music he got his start in programming when his dad bought him a computer instead of a piano even from an early age he never let petty obstacles overcome him a notes hook his new computer and learned how to make his own synthesizer hell yeah so now he knew how to make music and program I'm not just telling you this because many of the games he would go on to make feature music written and performed by him this was also how he was able to win money for a game he designed as a kid right from the get-go he was poised to draw his own path and that wasn't even into games as a kid won't forget he was in the games most kids are but he wasn't in the games in the sense that he knew he wanted to make them as an adult after dropping out of high school at 17 his entry into the games industry was according to him accidental he was his third attempt at getting a job and he picked the programming job at a small developer named interlink he didn't even know how to program anymore but he showed off the game he won the contest within the interview it wasn't until later that he was found out and almost fired but he still knew how to make music so he was transferred over from programming to the sound Division this guy just never gives up if this was his first industry job but he didn't last for very long and his output from interlink wasn't very significant or representative of what Anna would eventually become he does sound work in composing for a few games like the Famicom port of altered beast and planning for two different Gundam games after a year of this anno decided to hunker down and work his way up through the ranks of interlink no I'm just kidding he dumped interlink and created his own independent game company in 1989 entertainment imagination magnificence or GIM when he was just 19 what were you doing when you're 19 I was hosting a college radio show this dude had his own game company okay let's take a second and pause here the year is 1989 game development in Japan even to this day has typically been concentrated in the hands of a few big players basically a know when indie before anyone knew that was a viable option Japanese Indies still struggle in Japan for example Japanese indie developers didn't even have their own space at tokyo game show until 2013 and digressions aside we can only speculate how in the world a 19 year old convinced multiple people to work for his independent game company the year that the Gameboy came out in any case NLO started II am because he wanted to create original games most of these games like casino kid 2 are essentially write-offs which I know sounds mean but they're fine games probably the most famous of innos gains from this period is panic restaurant which is one of my personal favorites and one of the few of his games to see release in North America and who doesn't love an action platformer about a chef battling evil food monsters yeah not today chicken legs tonight you're on the menu wait that doesn't make any sense another one that stands out is 1991's Japan only timezone it features a baseball hat wearing kid who needs to save his pink haired friend from an evil Doc Brown I guess it's ultimately a pretty standard Famicom adventure game but things like skateboarding and your boomerang hat are super endearing it's way cooler than Adventure Island yeah I said it however enno was quickly disillusioned by the facts of Japanese development at the time in his own words I was forced to put licensed characters in the titles and that was pretty tough on me and I got mentally unstable at a point towards the end there was a period where I wouldn't even go to my office because I was so upset this is I think in reference to Sun Man which you might have heard of it was supposed to be a superman game developed for sunsoft now I've played Sun man ultimately it was never released but you can do a lot a lot worse for a Superman video game than the Sun man it is another example of his unwavering conviction and represents the first hints of the mental health issues that would plague a nose professional life Eno dissolved II am in 1992 and left the game industry for the next two years he worked for a car magazine as a consultant I'm not sure what that means or how the hell he got that job what did he suddenly know about cars but what's important was that it was this job that would eventually bring a note to San Francisco in the 1994 Macworld Expo the expo itself was fine but what really struck Anna was a bee an event an event where developers were sharing music getting high and excited about their publishers it was rock and roll according to n o ok game creators can be cool not just nerds out there there are actually cool creators literally on the plane ride back to Japan an O decided to return to games and he convinced the resident of his magazines publishing company to invest in him I'm guarantee we're not exactly sure how but yes that is how in 1994 he got back into games he took his boss's boss's money and founded his X company warf warf is the company that would eventually produce the d trilogy games i mentioned earlier and like i kind of hate the idea of the auteur director trope especially in video games but and i'll put some serious work into each game perhaps this is no more than any other indie director puts into a game but while at warp a know claims he did sketch design sound effects music directing and production for every game not sure how true that is but warp games all have a very distinct flavor they're all a little weird they're weird games and that's why I love them warps early games were on Panasonic's short-lived 3do which Anna went all-in on for a few reasons one was practical the 3do was one of the first major consoles that was 100% CD based and therefore required a lot less capital to make games for example at the time it cost about $10 a unit to make a Nintendo game on a cartridge before any other fees another was that the 3do was the brainchild of trip Hopkins the founder of EA and more importantly for us the person who embodied to endow the San Francisco startup culture he fell in love with that Mac world that's my personal a head Canon that they just got high and talked about the Beatles but that's probably not what happened probably though it's what they're famous for warps horror games are not indicative of the rest of their work most of their other games could be most generously described as minigame collections less charitably as shovel we're still all of these games have a through line that is unmistakable even indeed once you get to the puzzle sections you see the echoes of these of the games but let's get back on track here warp wasted no time publishing its first two games within its first year of operation slope on world for the 3do actually made it over to the US as tripped it's literally a reference to trip Hopkins maybe they did acid together anyway it's a funky take on Puyo Puyo gameplay with some fun horror stuff thrown in it's like a no thought you know would make Puyo Puyo better scary and that was that and it's like this is the kind of thing I love about enno a lot of his games have a very simple core concept like what if I make a striptease mahjong game where girls get to beat up the pervert or how about a sumo wrestling game where all the characters are robots this one's called mm Totsuka keikaku d mega Basu and this is crazy like punchy wait style game right here look at this it's full 3d it's split screen what's in 1994 like the frame rates real solid it controls like garbage but like man this is amazing dee came out the following year in 1995 and when compared to warps other games it's obvious Anna was throwing everything he had into it according to him the whole thing was a major gamble if Dee failed then warp would have to close the game started out as an adventure game with story added later in a development it was given a twist ending but Anna still thought it was too boring that's when he added the ultimate x-factor violent murder and cannibalism which isn't something that will get you a t14 rating usually Eno knew that these additions wouldn't be approved by 3do so he deliberately turned in the final version of Dee late so that no one would have time to double-check the final build which is crazy I feel like that is exactly the type of thing that the ers RB would go ballistic over I guess no one cared I guess anybody who noticed like was was cool I mean even the warp team didn't know about the cannibalism until after the game's release which also means he must have animated those completely by himself this guy everything is riding on Dee's success hey everything ran on that B and he pulls a stunt like this man but it worked in Japan D where it's instead known as Dino Shoku Taku aka DS dinner table sold at least a million copies and became a cult hit abroad it was one of the first horror games I ever played and at the Rec young age of 11 it scared the crap out of me I first played it on the PlayStation and some of these success and popularity today is due to the fact that it made it off of the 3do but quite frankly Sony didn't treat enno so well of the 100,000 copies Sony promised published they only made 28,000 even though D still came out on the 3do and Saturn for an indie like warp that could have been enough to break the company but let's put a pin in that for now so how do you follow up a masterpiece like D well if you're n oh you do it with 1996's short warp a minigame collection that most notably came packaged with a warp branded condom only 10,000 copies were produced likely because of the inclusion of the condom I mean packaging a package for the package must have been expensive Anna says that at the time he was again struggling with his mental health and needed to do something out of the ordinary to make himself feel balanced public service announcement here condoms expired I just need to know if there are any babies out there because of short warp I mean who wouldn't be able to resist getting it on after watching this mmm dummy not fix dick Figures now we talking perhaps not coincidentally this was the same year where Anna announced enemy zero his next game to start the character of Laura at a Sony Expo event with the trailer that ended with a PlayStation logo morphing into a Sega Saturn logo he even had a Sega vice-president crashed the stage and say welcome to Sega how absolutely punk rock is that Anna was giving Sony the bird for the way they treated D it was an industry only event however and because of this no known video exists which is a shame while working on enemy zero with Sega Anna made a deal for another game that would be the near opposite of the visual Heavy D real sound kaze no regret or winds of regret winds of regret is basically an interactive audio game I have the feeling it was created because Anna was like you know video games what if we did without the video Sega agreed to donate one thousand Saturn's to the blind and in return NL gave them exclusive rights of the game as you might expect it was not hugely successful and because of that has never been translated into English as far as I can tell according to n o this game cost more to produce and develop then enemy zero but again he did make the manufacturing more expensive by shipping herb seeds and a Braille insert with copies of the Saturn version and that's just beautiful not a lot of developers were thinking about video game accessibility in the mid-90s there's not much I can tell you about the game itself however Anna was able to get earthbound composer Keiichi Suzuki to write the music speaking of music I mentioned earlier that Anna got Michael Nyman a composer who's read music for films like the piano Gattaca and man on wire to write the music for enemies zero by cornering him in a hotel room when he came to visit Japan but my favorite part of the story is that enno turned down the first thing nine men wrote him turns out this is what convinced Neyman to actually take the project seriously and it resulted in a tense emotional score that elevated an already ambitious and unique horror game that may as well be an unofficial alien game one of its standout accomplishments up to this point warp have been able to put out multiple games a year but then d2 happened d2 was initially supposed to be a direct sequel to D starring Laura's son however it was intended for the M to the follow up to the 3do and that didn't work out for anyone the m2 was canceled shortly before its scheduled release leaving the 50% completed version of d2 out in the cold n-no eventually scrapped this version of d2 which was intended to be a real-time 3d action game with swords thankfully he had a long-standing relationship with Sega and deed to development would restart on the Sega Dreamcast in fact there are unconfirmed claims that enno created the system's spiral logo but something happened to him during production later he would say he was feeling mentally unstable again but it's unclear exactly what this means my two cents I'd say he was understandably stressed from the cancellation of the m2 and the money his company would have to lose from rebuilding the game for a new system noe even contributed to Sega Rally - as a musician during this time likely as a way to make some quick cash for warp while they worked on d2 d2 was finally released in 1999-2000 in North America while completely different from the original version it was still very much an action game with guns instead of swords and a lot of story to much story and lots of symbolism and other stuff and honestly like the whole thing is a bit of a mess though for my money it's the kind of mess that only a genius like NO could make which I'll admit is itself still a recommendation despite the name d2 it is the third game featuring a character named Laura and has no meaningful connection to enemy zero or the first D after d2 came out and sold worse than expected being a Dreamcast exclusive couldn't have helped Ken gno briefly changed the name of his company from warp to super warp and then disbanded that and created an entirely new company from yellow to orange or FY to yo the lineage of all this is not super clear but after d2 flopped and I left the games industry once again super warp /f yto would instead focus on communication marketing and design they helped market disc Andy for example they also did other things like design a way to buy sodas from a vending machine with your cell phone like Apple pay but way before the iPhone the first few years at F yto were tough a no toyed with returning to gainesville wanted to prove to himself that he could succeed outside of that industry and he did he also kept himself relevant to his Japanese fans through blogging and radio shows but from his global gaming fans perspective he just vanished it's not clear to me exactly when ken GNO decided to return to game development he didn't start doing interviews with American games pressed until about 2009 when his WiiWare game you me and the cubes came out unsurprisingly enno was fascinated with the possibilities of the week he even made a model of the Wiimote out of paper just so he could play with it more you mean the cubes is perhaps one of my favorite games made by enna it is a motion controlled physics based puzzle game where you spawn people on an ever expanding and rotating cube floating above a dark ominous void it's cute dark funny feels poetic maybe has a penis joke in it also the gameplay itself works really well with motion controls what's most interesting to me are the wholesome undercurrents of the game sure your Fallows characters are trapped teetering on the edge of a cold abyss from birth yearning for a freedom that only you can give them by being a good physics understanding god but the prevailing theme of teamwork and an incredible localization really make it stand out from the rest of annals work fyt o also released some mobile games during this time but these games are no longer playable on the iOS due to the iOS 11 massacre I played them before iOS 11 and they were cool and unusual about what you'd expect from a kenji hano game anna's celebrity never really returned to the west and for many this would be the last time they heard of the man until his passing On February 20th 2013 at the age of 42 he apparently had one more game he wanted to make Kaka soon it was successfully crowdfunded and his colleagues planned on finishing it but there hasn't been any news on it since 2015 for this video we framed Anna's life through the lens of video games specifically his horror games but from my research I found that he did so much more he was in a band if it's some sort of radio show he wrote books including an autobiography that I have over here I put it on the bottom hold on and the flowers are still standing yeah this autobiography it's called super 27 years life I would love to get translated and another book written for his son after the Fukushima nuclear disaster in 2011 about how to talk to your kids about nuclear power he donated all proceeds to charity it was through looking at this book trying to glean any info about it from OTO Japanese to English translated pages that I stumbled upon this Amazon review electricity can be said to be his business tool and really that's that's perfect the best description I found of kenji on o is the result of a machine struggling to understand us in a way that we can in turn understand each other we framed Anna's life through video games but his legacy the electricity he put out into the world stretches far beyond from his blog to radio to his band to paving the way for other Japanese independent developers he put more creativity into this world than most can even really comprehend a true legend if ever there was one and that's it for now thanks for watching don't forget to subscribe hit that Bell and check us out twitch.tv slash stops building some fighting we're back Wiz days for punchy wait Wednesdays at 6 p.m. Pacific Time and also on a personal note coming back to this topic kind of meant a lot to me the enemy 0 and D 2 videos especially I reviewed them back in 2010 and that was right after I quit my job and decided to really start doing YouTube kind of full-time seriously and I've made those videos like right after doing that and you know for the music that we used in the d2 review that was actually all music that I had written with a friend and reading about Kenji and Oh again is really inspiring and then realizing that the videos that I made about him were kind of when I was trying to strike it out of my own and and I was making my own music and I was doing this video thing and it feels like something that I would like to think that he would not found' be proud of but he'd be like yeah good for him you know I feel like maybe Kenji and it would be like yeah that guy's alright which is enough for me and by the way this actually used to be a patreon exclusive video so back in 22 years this is a patreon exclusive video we uh we polished it up and put it out here for everybody else but like hey man everybody here you watch it now they got to watch this video for two gears you weren't missing now stop missing out and get on stop skeletons and fighting on patreon okay it's like tell a friend follow us on twitter follow us on twitter all us on instagram facebook just hit the bell keep hanging out keep sharing videos keep liking keep commenting oh and the new t-shirts the new t-shirts are here is a brand new stop skills inviting t-shirts from pixel Empire please check them out they're on sale now they're for sale yeah oh yeah they are for sale they are just now on sale you can now purchase them you could not purchase them right before I finish the seconds but upon finishing this sentence you can now produce it [Music] yeah all right thanks watching a buck bye

Channel: Stop Skeletons From Fighting

Views: 98,873

Rating: 4.9557247 out of 5

Keywords: Kenji eno, horror video games, japan, history, dreamcast, d trilogy, enemy zero, d2, 3do, sega, panasonic, trip, indie, warp, ssff, stop skeletons from fighting, stop skeletons, grace kramer, derek alexander, hvgn, happy video game nerd, wiiware, you me and the cubes

Id: i3TrfyNTcB8

Length: 20min 31sec (1231 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 09 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/Shrekt115]

Feels just yesterday Derek was gushing about this guy