The Untold History of Japanese Game Developers Volume 2 by John Szczepaniak

Author:John Szczepaniak [Szczepaniak, John]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Published: 2016-02-14T00:00:00+00:00

仲井 覚

NAKAI, Satoshi

DOB: 24 February 1967 / Birthplace: Hokkaido / Blood Type: O

Satoshi Nakai

JS: <introduces self in Japanese> I'm sorry for not being able to speak fluently in Japanese.

SN: It's me who should apologise for not speaking English! The best I can manage is broken English with people from Sweden or Columbia.555 Even though I watch BBC dramas and drink Islay Malt Whisky, English just does not stick. <laughs> Sherlock and Utopia are great, but liquor doesn't actually improve one's English. Too bad. <laughs>

JS: Speaking of language… The kanji in your family name was written 中井, but now is written 仲井. May I ask why?

SN: Is the concept of seimei handan known in the English-speaking world?556

My real name is Satoshi Nakai, which is written in Japanese as "中井 覚". A long time ago, when I was too lazy to come up with a good pen name, I decided to replace the character "覚" from my first name with the character "覺", which is used in Taiwan and other countries.557 In my youth, I thought this was so esoteric and cool! <laughs>

Most people aren't even able to read my original kanji name "覚" correctly as "Satoshi",558 and changing it to some obscure "old Chinese character" certainly didn't make it any easier! Eventually I had a change of heart, and thought, "Enough with this name that no one can read!" and changed it back.

As for the seimei handan I mentioned before, it's a way of telling if a name is lucky or unlucky based on the number of strokes used when writing the Chinese characters. Someone who was an expert at this technique told me that adding the "ｲ" component to the side of the "中" in my name would make it better, so I figured I'd give it a shot! <laughs>559 Man, this is not going to be easy for you to explain in English! But hey, you're the one who asked - not me! <laughs>

JS: I'll try! Do you remember the first game you saw?

SN: As a child? It was some tennis game, which is very old now. I was in elementary school at the time. From around that time until I started working in the industry, I had absolutely zero interest in games.

JS: Really? So your interests were purely in art?

SN: No, not at all. Before I started doing games, I was a waiter for a long time. I had always liked drawing, so I started looking around for art-related work, and eventually found some doing art for computer games.

JS: Describe your first job in games - it was Last Armageddon on computers?

SN: That was 25 years ago, when I was 21 years old. A quarter century ago! <laughs> Hmm… How old was I? In 1997, I was working on Biohazard, before that was Gun Hazard… <pauses, reflects, goes back chronologically>

JS: Going way back there's Valken… I want to discuss that, because it influenced both Gun Hazard by Omiya Soft, and Metal Warriors by LucasArts…

JS: The chapter for you gentlemen will be over 30 pages.

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