July 1, 2017|

Filed under: Straight from the Source (Interview)

Straight from the Source: Vitei Backroom (Paper Garden)

Note:

CM = Chris McLaughlin
PM = Pauline Machabert
JC = Jetha Chan

Table of Contents:

Page 1 — Introductions and History
Page 2 — Working in the Backroom
Page 3 — Backroom vs. Frontroom and Creative Freedom
Page 4 — Throwing Chickens in VR
Page 5 — How to Organize a Flat Company
Page 6 — Escaping Nintendo’s Shadow
Page 7 — Wrapping up the Party

Page 7 — Wrapping up the Party

I guess when you’re under those contracts with Sony, for example, you might have some restrictions on what you can say?

CM: Yeah, sometimes there are restrictions, and then sometimes it’s easier to just be like ‘should we Tweet or talk about this? It’s probably OK, but if we don’t we’re definitely not going to get into trouble, so don’t bother’. One thing that Vitei does do really well is community outreach. In Kyoto, I would like to think that all of the people who are aware of the Kyoto development scene think that Vitei is one of the best games companies in Kyoto. I don’t know if that’s true, but, we do – we’ve not done it for a while, but – we do a games night every month, called ‘MEGA Night’. I’d love to do another one soon. You’ve seen the collection of consoles behind there?

Yeah.

CM: We have a bunch of them set up playing games, we’ve got music, drinks, and stuff, and we invite everybody and anybody we know. Two BitSummits ago… was it last year or the year before?

JC: Oh, that was the MEGA Night where I got hired, actually!

CM: We did a huge one on the Friday night of BitSummit.

JC: It was gigantic.

CM: It was in the old office, which was probably three or four times the floor space of this.

JC: I’m pretty sure that was against some sort of fire code or something.

CM: It was huge, we had loads of people coming in. Yoshida-san came from Sony and Swery. Anybody who’s who at BitSummit came to the party. That wouldn’t have happened if we were just a tiny no-name company who never pushed anything.

Kind of like Q-Games this year, they had their party.

CM: Yeah, yeah. Our party was better.

[laughs] I’ll have to come to your party next time.

JC: Are you talking about their pre-BitSummit part?

Step 6: Turn on the party lights. pic.twitter.com/dja1QbYexC

— VITEI Backroom (@ViteiBackroom) February 14, 2017

Yeah.

JC: They do that every year.

CM: I think definitely within Kyoto, people who know about video games, especially people in the foreign video game industry, think well of Vitei – at least I hope they do. But getting that out of our little game dev bubble in Kyoto and into the wider world is something that we need to do. I think based on the response that we get from people here, if we can get that word out then people will like us everywhere else. I hope so. It’s just getting over the first hurdle of getting out of Kyoto, and then getting out of Japan, and then getting to the next stage.

With such an international team, it seems like something that could really work.

CM: Yeah, so hopefully. Fingers crossed. We’re still very young, the Backroom itself is still only four years old – only a year and a half if you count from when it became an actual separate child company – I think for being young, we’re doing OK. The company still exists, we’re still getting paid, so it’s good. [laughs]

[laughs] Those are the important parts!

Is there anything else you guys would like to add before we wrap this up? Any comments that you really want people to know about the Backroom?

JC: It’s great.

CM: Would recommend it.

[laughs] Ten out of ten?

PM: I think it’s a utopia.

CM: It’s a utopia, yeah.

PM: I think so.

CM: I don’t think we’ve got anything more to say. We’ve got no idea what Giles said, but it’s probably more comprehensive. It’s just nice. Something we always want to do, but never get a chance to because we’re always busy, is do something more with this room down here. This isn’t really anything for an interview, nobody’s going to care what happens in this exact room, but in general with this sort of community outreach thing… part of the reason we have this building with this giant empty space here is because we wanted to encourage other people to come and use it. We’ve had a few people who have put on workshops and a couple of game jams have been done here. But we don’t make as much use of it as we could.

PM: There’s going to be movie nights coming back.

CM: Oh, that’s good.

PM: You see that screen above the bar?

Is there a projector?

PM: Yeah.

CM: It’d be nice to do more of that kind of thing. If you ever have an event you want to run, please remember us.

Definitely.

JC: It’s a shame we don’t have the kitchen set up. There’s a giant range hood here because this place used to be a restaurant.

Oh, really?

JC: You could do some serious cooking in there if you had the burners and everything.

CM: We talked about that for a while as well, about maybe turning this into a café a few days a week, or even renting it out to a separate company so that they could use it.

Like a video game café?

CM: Yeah. But everybody’s so busy with actual work, there’s no time to do fun… well, not that work’s not fun upstairs, but to do personal interest projects.

JC: I’m just saying, if there were burners there, I’d cook you guys lunch some time.

CM: That’d be good.

PM: Cool! He’s really good.

CM: He’s a really good cook.

JC: I’m not that good.

You’ve done your…

JC: I’ve got some game!

[laughs] Thank you guys.

Source Gaming is a website dedicated to bringing accurate information to all gaming fans through translations, editorials and original research. You can follow us on Twitter, or ‘like’ us on Facebook.

This interview was conducted June 19th, 2017 in the lobby of the Vitei Backroom in Kyoto. Bold text indicates statements or questions made by PushDustIn. The interview was transcribed and then sent to Giles Goddard and the Vitei Backroom team for approval.

Special thanks to Pauline Machabert of the Vitei Backroom for organizing this interview.

Also, special thanks to Japanese Nintendo and Minus World for their assistance with transcribing this interview.

This interview represents 14 hours of work. If you love what you see, please consider donating to the Source Gaming Patreon. We don’t run ads on this site, so the money we receive from donations is the only thing keeping this site up.

Check out our interview with the CEO of Vitei Games, Giles Goddard.