In the sweat mist of a late 90s techno hall, Tetsuya Mizuguchi got his first glimpse of what would become his life's work. The young Japanese designer, still fresh from the success of creating one of Sega's biggest arcade hits, found himself on a balcony at Zurich's Street Parade - an offshoot of Berlin's celebrated Love Parade - watching out over a crowd lost to the rhythm. "This DJ is playing, and 100,000 people are moving with the music. The sound changed, and the movement changed. I watched from the top, and was like 'wow, what is this?'" What if you could play this, Mizuguchi thought to himself. What if he could turn this into a game?
It's an idea that still occupies Mizuguchi when I meet him in Tokyo, where we walk away from the sweltering mob of Roppongi towards its quieter back-streets and to the boardroom of the mobile game studio where he's currently consulting. Mizuguchi talks in fractured, thoughtful English, taking his time as he gathers his words; I've always found talking to him like one of those slow, stilted yet utterly engrossing conversations that takes place in the early hours while your ears are still ringing from the nightclub you've left behind.
Music is vital to Mizuguchi, of course, from the electronica spine of games such as Rez and Child of Eden through to the rhythmic puzzles of Lumines. As a teen in Otaru, on Japan's northern isle of Hokkaido, Mizuguchi became besotted with music television in its infancy, tuning in to MTV to get lost in the sugar punk of Cyndi Lauper, XTC, and Duran Duran. The language of the 80s music video, with their detached sense of cool and angular neon, would leave an imprint; at university, while studying media aesthetics, Mizuguchi took a Sony beta pro editor to his room where he'd tinker with his own video remix of Art of Noise's Paranoima.
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