Giles Goddard was one of the first Western employees ever to work at Nintendo’s Kyoto headquarters; today, his outlook on what a video game studio should look like stemmed from that experience.
“I do all the things that Nintendo didn’t do, and I don’t do any of the things they did do,” says Goddard, 51, from the first floor of Chuhai Labs, the game studio and publisher he helped found in the same city as his old company.
“There were lots of things that happened every day I didn’t have a choice over. It was like a factory. I didn’t like that.”
His efforts to create a different kind of environment have paid off, as Chuhai Labs has enjoyed an especially noteworthy 2022. This summer, the 15-employee company released Cursed To Golf, a dungeon crawler that sees players assuming the role of a golfer trying to escape purgatory by completing 18 high-fantasy holes. It has received attention from international gaming media and generally positive reviews — including one from the robot host of Cartoon Network’s “Toonami” block of programming.
It has also helped introduce more people to Chuhai Labs’ brand, which is more freewheeling and accessible than corporate and closed-off. “We’re almost like a video games media site,” says 37-year-old American producer Kinsey Burke. “We have a podcast. We have a Discord. ... We do a little bit of everything, even though we’re a studio first.”
In keeping with Kyoto
Chuhai Labs’ success underlines a shift over recent years in Kyoto’s video game industry. The city, spurred in part by Nintendo’s presence, has cultivated a strong independent studio community, especially among non-Japanese residents. Goddard points to Q-Games, founded by fellow Nintendo veteran Dylan Cuthbert, and 17-Bit, started by Jake Kazdal, among others offering a different perspective on what gaming and a game company can be.
“We still work with publishers and partners, but we’ve also been able to make our own things out of pocket,” says American communications chief Mark Lentz, 37. “When you’re just out on your own ... we can start a podcast. We can make our own games. We can do all sorts of wacky things.”
Goddard’s path to Kyoto began in his home country of England, where he worked at the U.K. developer Argonaut Games as a teenager in the 1980s. He moved to Nintendo in the early 1990s to work on titles such as Star Fox and 1080 Snowboarding while also programming the elastic Mario face that greeted players when they started up Super Mario 64.
“One of the reasons I left (Nintendo) was because ... you kind of feel like you don’t have any control over your destiny, and this is what you’re going to do until you die,” he says. “And if you’re a foreigner, you’re never going to be promoted. You kind of peak.”
Goddard left Nintendo in the late ’90s and worked first as a freelancer before setting up his own studio, Vitei Inc., in 2002. He continued to work closely with his old employer in porting and creating second-party games. The company kept active as the independent game scene in Kyoto emerged, with new studios sprouting up around them and then the arrival of indie conferences such as BitSummit, which launched in 2013.
By 2020, the team decided to switch things up and create a new brand within Vitei, one that would create their own games and be more outward facing, unlike the contract work-centric structure they had embraced before.
“We were going to publish this game, Halloween Forever, and we realized we needed to establish ourselves, establish a new brand,” Lentz says.
“We just had a company name,” Goddard says. “There was no brand there. ... We made one.”
Open to the room
Lentz and Burke — who joined the company two years ago but had to wait until earlier in 2022 to actually move to Kyoto due to the COVID-19 pandemic — helped to develop the image, which included the name Chuhai Labs, the logo and character (named “Chu Chu”) and uploads that introduced the project by way of internet-era irony.
Just as importantly, Chuhai Labs established a work culture far more relaxed than what Goddard described of his early days at Nintendo. Visiting the office on a Thursday afternoon, located amid the quiet back streets of Tsukinukecho, reveals a laid-back, two-story workplace. Employees work on various projects upstairs at their own pace, while the first floor features a bar area featuring energy drinks and alcohol with a neon sign shaped like Chu Chu nearby.
“A lot of companies go out and hire the best people they can find, and then they put them in a box in the corner of the room and say, ‘Now you work on this,’” Goddard says. He thinks when you have top talent, they should be working on projects they are passionate about, and you should be receptive to their ideas, too. In fact, that is how they came up with Cursed To Golf and everything else that followed — from the Chuhai Labs rebrand to the podcast.
They offer an instructive story. “So we got this tiny little game console called a Playdate, and everyone in the company was given a week to come up with game pitches for it,” Lentz says, pulling out a yellow device that’s smaller than a Game Boy with a crank attached to its side. He emphasizes how most companies wouldn’t make such an open call for pitches, allowing every individual a chance to share their ideas.
“That was the s---,” Lentz says, praising the process. He laughs and points at Goddard, “even though he won, because he’s a game f---ing designer!” Goddard’s Whitewater Wipeout subsequently became the first title released for the Playdate.
“A lot of these youngsters, they like these old consoles because they didn’t grow up with them. They like the concept of making an 8-bit game, and playing it. That’s kind of a turn off to me, because I’ve done that, seen that,” Goddard says, holding up the Playdate. “Things like this I find really cool, almost like a step back from that. I like new things to play with ... I think I just like new toys.”
Chuhai Labs is currently working on new projects that it can’t announce yet — employees close windows on their computers when I head to the second floor to take a look — but the goal for the company is to keep moving forward with everyone’s input.
“Trust people, even when you don’t think they’re right,” Goddard says. “I’ve always been reluctant to let people make their own mistakes, but I think that’s really important.”
With your current subscription plan you can comment on stories. However, before writing your first comment, please create a display name in the Profile section of your subscriber account page.