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I've wanted to write some good words about good things lately. Let me just toss them all into one post:

Sega

Nintendo

Sony

It'd be weird if I left out my own employer, right? The exclusives coming out of Worldwide Studios are really on point lately. It seems like there used to be tiers of studios, some making AAA games and some making weirdo off-kilter stuff or Vita ports. I think we've reached the point where every studio has released, or will release, award contender titles. 

Marcus D - Retro'd 2

I'm a big Marcus D fan, that's known. 

His latest album, Retro'd 2, is one of his best works - 20 tracks of genuine love for games, expressed over a massive variety of styles.

No one track represents the entire album super well, because of the high stylistic variety. I recommend a listen (and a purchase!):

http://marcusd.net/album/retrod-2

Man oh man, is this thing made with love. Look at that cover art! This American dude has gone to Tokyo to reside to Live The Gaming Dream, and look at that cover that results. Marcus seated intently at a Japanese arcade cabinet. A cigar putting off rainbow-colored, pixel-shaped smoke. Presumably elder game-music-composer dude I can't identify, standing behind him and looking over his shoulder, as if he were a ghost looking in from the beyond. 

To say nothing of the source material: Mega Man. Out Run. Super Mario World. PilotWings. SimCity. Mischief Makers. Mystic Quest. Chrono Trigger.

And for the fans who bought physical, it gets delivered in a Super NES game box. 

Meeting (and Befriending) Your Heroes

Before Retro'd 2, I managed to catch a Marcus show (with Substantial) in London last March as part of a work trip (such luck!) and I had the great chance to really converse with Marcus (and the inimitable Funky DL)! I didn't sleep that night - way too exciting to meet some heroes and find that they're awesome and genuine people.

Marcus and I, to my surprise, bonded over the Yakuza series (thanks again, Sega!) and I told him I'd shout when I was next in Tokyo, where he resides.

I followed through, and so did Marcus! We've since met up a couple times and bonded over life as expat, games, music, and more. Picture perfect bromance, really.

Still, I was stunned to find myself listed in the Special Thanks in the Retro'd 2 official album booklet (in the shape and style of a Super NES instruction manual, naturally).

Baby's first Special Thanks mention! 

As I told Marcus, it was a big surprise and a bigger honor. 

Documenting Your Values

On further reflection, I couldn't think of a better place to unlock that achievement. I think Marcus's Retro'd project specifically signifies more than just fun video game tributes. It's the best of that genre, if you want to call it that, but it's building toward a cultural statement about the escapist power in the artistry of video games, the nostalgia toward the 16-bit era, the childhood spent in front of consoles and not TV shows, and those three elements' power to bring people together in this hyper-narrow area of interest.

Or is it that narrow? I want to compose a manifesto, not unlike the Holstee Manifesto:

But one that documents the culture exposed in Retro'd and unites its fanbase. I think there's a broader group of people who live this life and are going unconnected, and it's high time that the Internet (and the occasional PDF print-out taped to a wall) fixed that. 

If you can identify with this much, give me a shout. I'd love to hear your thoughts and your sentences and your values.

I've been meaning to write this post for over two years. It's about time I did it.

Ever since I first laid eyes on an NES around age 4, I've loved video games and they've been as natural to me as water to a fish.

Everyone who's come across me knows some version of this.

I was reminded this morning that I wrote papers in school - from 5th grade composition class all the way to an undergraduate senior thesis - showing love for games, their creators, their history, and their unique contributions to the future of art.

I'm reminded often that my (perhaps suboptimal) choice of college major was Japanese, out of a desire born around age 10 to learn the language of the place where the games came from. 

I tried to enter the games industry a few times and got chewed up and spat out. There was the editorial gig at Shacknews. There was the internship at Realtime Worlds (RIP). I almost found a way in via events staff at an E3. Each time culminated in disappointment and a dead end. Naturally, that got discouraging.

Despite the prior failures, I couldn't stop myself from continuing to try. It was just in my bones. I'd have an existential crisis for the rest of my life if I didn't make it into the world of video games and make it stick.

Quoting myself from 2010, after the collapse of Realtime Worlds:

I had a quick talk with my boss on the way out of town. He asked if, after this experience, I'd stay in the games industry. My answer: "Hell yes."

But each time I tried I sought hints or patterns about who got to keep their jobs. It seemed that business leadership kept their jobs, so I focused my grad school studies in management. Studios closed with a single failure - best to aim for publishers and platforms where portfolio offerings provide job security. Job listings looked for e-commerce experience. 

So, off to Japanese e-commerce I went. The intent all along was just to show e-commerce experience, though it'd provide for a good trade to work if the games industry would never work out. 

That move, despite a couple detours, proved correct. In Tokyo I established Japanese working experience for real, became established in analytics tools, and started to show signs of rapid development. 

As I started a job search in 2015 I mostly looked at e-commerce, but through a grad school alum there was an opening at Sony. I tossed in a resume, and - this is where luck was preparation meeting opportunity - the alum recognized me, knew there was an unlisted opening that was a perfect fit, and referred me to that. "That" was the analytics team at Sony Interactive Entertainment, where they used the same tool as the Japanese e-commerce company and needed a Japanese speaker who was comfortable in an informal US-based tech environment and knew gaming products inside and out. 

Once I was called a "unicorn" in my first-round interview, I knew things looked good. 

In spring of 2015 I relocated to San Diego, started at Sony, and entered a whirlwind of never-ending releases and new features. There's only been expansion - higher salaries, more PTO, more world travel, larger teams, more collaborations, more celebrations of new releases, more employees-only sales.

I work directly on the PS4 console, which is an amazing thing to say. I have a dev kit - the magical weird-looking console that has secret options and features. If I really want to nerd out, I have four dev kits - a classic PS4, a PS4 Pro, a Vita, and a PS TV (remember that thing?)

In short, I found just the thing: a secure job in the games industry, dealing with Japan all the time, having a meaningful impact on the actual product and platform. 

I know exactly when it sank in: E3 2016. I had been in the job for a year by this point and knew it was going to stick. At 31, I finally walked into the trade show I had read about since I was about 10. I've walked into dark and exciting games events before, but never into one so large, loud and well-produced that it was like walking into Video Game Disneyland. The floor's energy is itself energizing - you feel like you could forego sleep from now on and just soak in new games. It only gets better in evenings when you surround yourself with industry friends and their friends. I now have a friend crew that spans all 3 of Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo. Those fascinating, smart, funny people had become a circle I belonged to. I have peers, and they're awesome. That signaled to me that I had made it into the industry for real.

If I could talk to my younger self, the only thing I'd need to say is: it all came true.

PS:

This job is an absolute joy. I pretty much never go to bed or wake up dreading work. I never have a case of the Mondays.

It turns out that you can identify with a company's mission/vision/values. Sony overall stands for respectful attitudes and R&D and engineering and experimentation. Even at a US-based subsidiary that's predominantly American in ways of working, the benefits of Japanese corporate paternalism show up with wonderfully generous health insurance, relocation, training and travel. After a year of this perfect storm of awesome I felt deep down that I really could spend the entire rest of my career with Sony. That's not to openly state a commitment, but rather to say that this good fit is so strong that there's no desire to hop anymore. 

In a very Slumdog Millionaire kind of way, Destiny might have changed my life.

For all my talk about a lifelong love of video games, I spent the vast majority of that time and energy in shooters.

Over the last 20 years I've obsessed over 3 Quake games, 3 Halo games, and a smattering of others in between. I consistently made it my culture, whether it was high school spent "antisocially" making friends over IRC, or watching Red vs Blue with my Halo clanmates (who doubled as college roommates), turning the show's dialogue and our own badly executed plays into inside jokes.

But after about 2010 that all went quiet. 

While the industry obsessed over Facebook games and avoiding competing with Call of Duty, my beloved genre went into a major slump. I slumped with it.

2011, 2012 and 2013 were challenging. Years of failure and opportunities gone awry. I barely played any games during the time, either. Any time I tried shopping for them, there was nothing that grabbed me. Starting a game usually instantly led to a disinterest and a desire to do something else. I can't talk about causation and mild depression, but I can talk about correlation and mild depression. 

Destiny brought my love of games back to life. Other games have become the base of internet culture (see also: Overwatch), but the arrival of Destiny was like a violent gasp of air after finally surfacing from underwater. 

I started launched it only to see what my shiny new PS4 could do. You know when you get a new console, but you don't have any new games, so you go looking for demos, just anything to show off the system? 

The Destiny demo had no more obligation than that. But the demo may have been the only one ever to convert me from a skeptic to a buyer. And it did it after just two levels.

I had never seen an FPS level so stunning as the moon. The game went on to tantalizingly borrow elements of MMO design: inventories, upgrades, subclasses, elemental items, and gorgeous, epic level design.

And brought best-in-class FPS gameplay: fantastic, natural controls. Solid, predictable guns and satisfying sounds. A soundtrack worthy of thousands of hours of repeated listens. 

What a game. I'm sure there's some API out there that can tell me how long I spent in the game. But I happily came out of the slump. All those hours got all my brain chemicals back in their normal, happy balance. 

Destiny took me back from "almost non-gamer" to "PS4 is the center of my household." Had that not happened, I'm sure I wouldn't have paid attention when a job opening appeared at Sony PlayStation.

Bungie, you did me a solid. Thanks for an excellent game.

Today, Destiny 2 releases. And I'm online with my crew. This is going to be great.

I believe that the 10-year mark after a certain date is a weighty one. 

In my experience to date, almost all things cease to be relevant after 10 years. The ones that remain just might remain for life.

I hold up many things to this bar, but I contemplate most:

• Music
• Life experiences

Music

Maybe it's just a pattern of aging, but I can't enjoy most music from my collection after 10 years. I can't still habitually listen to the Blink-182 or Incubus from my high school life, or the Jimmy Eat World and Paul Oakenfold from college, or the J-pop from the very end of college after my Japanese major was a fait accompli. Trying to listen now just undermines my previous love for it. Lyrics get picked apart and revealed to make no sense. Melodies wear thin. Heartbreaks dull.

The 10-year mark for dropping music isn't sudden, like the flip of a switch. It's more like a cliff, where interest falls off very slowly after 1 year but drops off dramatically in years 8, 9, and 10. 

But a few outliers have survived past the 10-year mark and thrived. (If you were wondering, the loungey wonders Supreme Beings of Leisure and the Middle East-inspired downtempo geniuses Dzihan & Kamien are going strong after 15-ish years.)

What is it about those artists and albums? Is it better music? Is it lighter and more accessible? Or is it deeper? Is it tied to particularly strong or pleasant memories? Does music change more rapidly today thanks to technology?

Sometimes I come near the 10-year mark and fear that I'm about to stop liking music that I managed to hold on to for that long. The Samurai Champloo soundtrack, which was deeply influential as I finished my college Japanese studies, suddenly got a little stale last year and it made me uncomfortable: I never want to forget the optimism and infatuation with which I dove into Japanese culture in college, and I tightly associate Champloo with that chapter.

Life experiences

10 years seems to be enough to separate me from most life experiences - then again, I was just 22 at the time.

That's a significant age for a typical 4-year college student, since 22 marks graduation and transition on to new things. So for me, it's been a flood of former milestones, thanks to Facebook Memories keeping track of the exact dates.

College itself feels like a remote memory. I'm no longer drawn to Austin, no longer spellbound by the UT Austin campus or looking to relive my frequent drives through the western hills. My core friendships have survived, and thanks to that there are new memories with the same folks to keep the nostalgia fountain flowing. 

Likewise, my time in Spain was transformational at the time, but I haven't kept up my Spanish and I've never been back to the country. 

The anniversary that actually inspired this post was my departure to Japan for the first time, which had crossed 10 years in late December 2016. The trip was a magical three weeks of nothing but exploration. That trip began my love affair with Tokyo and it hasn't ended. It may be rough to work in Tokyo, but it's hands-down my favorite place in the world to play.

Speaking of playing in Tokyo: I'll never forget catching up with college friends in the middle of Tokyo during that trip. Not only was it comfortingly familiar to mix old friends and a crazy new place, but it added even more excitement to have their experience and knowledge to guide me around busy places like Shibuya and Shinjuku for the first time. 

On the other hand, as I write now, I'm days away from the 10-year anniversary of leaving for rural Japan on the JET program. That memory is only receding. In retrospect, it was a sad and overwhelmingly lonely time. 

Still, with a job working for Sony, and with both business and pleasure travel to Japan in my upcoming calendar, it's safe to say that the country overall survived crossing the 10-year threshold. 

From my life right now, what will survive its 10-year anniversary?