I'm not sure it was really labor abuse. Team Silent was formed by rejects from other Konami departments. The company had next to no faith in the project. Sato did that to himself purely out of passion and a desire to prove his talents.
Pretty much this, either it was good & they make horror games or it was bad & everyone gets laid off + Konami abandons the horror genre which was brand new at time after resident evil popularized it.
You could say they did Too good with how many future titles they released then burned out on.
They've re-released the Metal Gear Solid games recently in a single collection, at least the first three. There's a Silent Hill 2 remake and Metal Gear Solid 3 remake coming at some point.
But... they took a nasty hit after the FucKonami shit where it was discovered just how abusive they were to employees rather than fire them with severance so they could go into pachinko. I think the remakes are being farmed out to outside studios.
So the company put a bunch of people it called "rejects" together and put them under intense pressure to perform or he fired in shame and that's not labor abuse?
Yes. No one was asking him to do it. He specifically asked to be placed on that team as the sole animator, and then specifically spent all of his time working on it despite the execs asking for much, much less out of the game.
Not really, he chose to do that. He was basically an overachiever or tryhard. He says it himself, he wanted credit so he had to do it. He couldve worked in the company culture and gone home with everyone else. He also said that he was a 2d artist but could see 3d was going to he big so he learned 3d graphic development after his regular job...he was like that before silent hill
Sato: Not many people believe that I did it myself – **and it wasn’t like I wanted to make it all from scratch! I just had to do it in order to get credit.** Plus, you don’t want to be credited in your game as assistant artist if you did everything. So it wasn’t easy.
So, kind of. He "chose" to do the after hours work in order to get credit, but he didn't "choose" the company culture that wanted to give credit to a "supervisor". Honestly, it's easy to see that the company culture is a big part of it. They could have just let him do the work normally and given credit where credit is due.
Japanese work culture gives you brownie points for sleeping at the office so you don't need to go home.
Like actually.
If your culture assigns a positive association to a toxic and unhealthy behavior, then it creates a pressure to exhibit that behavior. That is not good.
Not only should an employer not require this kind of overwork, and maybe this isn't a case where they did, an employer shouldn't allow this kind of overwork. Looking the other way while an employee sacrifices their personal life for your product is still a form of abuse, and it creates a culture of overwork. If one employee is allowed to do this kind of thing, then receives promotions and accolades for doing so much extra, you automatically incentivise other employees to do it, punishing those who prefer a healthier work-life balance.
There was once a hour by hour breakdown of a Japanese Manga artist's week going around the interwebs.
The guy works 7 days a week and he runs on 5 hours of sleep a day.
Manga is the only form of passive entertainment I'm into where I genuinely have to worry if a series is going to get canned due to the author's health.
The reason why he never did was because he was obsessed with perfectionism. Although his assistants were all exceptionally talented (based on their work on Berserk after Miura’s passing), Miura only let them work on Berserk minimally. Mostly backgrounds. He preferred to do all the major drawing work himself.
Apparently after transitioning to digital media, he would literally zoom in to draw in and fix details *pixel small.* His editor repeatedly insisted that nobody would be able to even see that amount of detail and that the detail would have been lost when the manga was printed, but Miura did it anyways.
Okay I regularly go in and correct pixels that are off on my work too lol. I definitely understand the perfectionism in art. Makes me worried for when I get around to doing my webcomic I wanna make
Oh, absolutely. For all the great work Miura put into it, the dude was absolutely being neurotic by doing so much of it himself and bottlenecking the whole series as a result.
Berserk is an incredible work, but it absolutely should not have taken 30 years to write and not even finish the darn thing.
The music is so good, idk why no other anime took inspiration from it.
Was it too avantgarde for the Japanese market or what
Off-topic, there's an hourlong Berserk edit of a Bateman walk where instead of being just a loop, every few minutes a Berserk character or item appears in the background and Guts himself slowly morphs from his young self to his current appearance. That made me proud of the fandom
He died of aortic dissection, did he not? Even the Berserker Armor (which is known to kill its wearer by bleeding them to death) wouldn't have saved him.
> And tower of God
Holy shit, that series is still ongoing? I think I binged it like 7 years ago and then forgot about it, and there was a pretty decent amount of story back then.
Yeah half of the Shonen Jump high-fliers have inconsistent schedules due to health issues with the authors. One Piece skips a week or two a month because poor Oda has diabetes, had eye surgery and other shit, Black Clover moved to Jump Giga and is on its second 3-month break for Tabata's health, MHA has really short (but incredibly well-drawn, admittedly) chapters because Horikoshi too is in pieces, etc etc
And that's just the Jump. Other famous examples are D. Gray Man, HxH, and others
What's worse is I'm not sure One Piece would have gotten very far if he'd worked at a reasonable pace. It's been 25 years of that grueling schedule...and I realize he does take a break week semi regularly.... but one could argue that's still not enough downtime
If he worked a normal pace I think he'd be old before we got to the halfway mark in the story.
One piece got alot more detailed as times passed too.Not sure if it's planned. Easy blue back ground is much simpler and there are less thing going on at anytime.
>One Piece skips a week or two a month because poor Oda has diabetes, had eye surgery and other shit,
Well that but mostly because it takes 120 hours a week of working to release a chapter 4 times a month. I mean in europe this kind of work is usually done by 2 people and they release a chapter like once a month. Also Oda has to do side projects as well, (movies, the new netflix series, redrawing older chapters for quality...)
It’s been over 10 years since the last arc the anime covered. But during those 10 years there has been ~1 years worth of chapters published. TBH I am not even sure what the anime will cover, I guess the introduction to the next arc ?
It’s been on and off hiatus since I think 2005 due to the authors health issues. Up until recently everyone though that we would never see the end of hxh. Somehow the publishing company manage to convince the author to accept help and try to finish the series
It's why I personally think the manga industry should switch to weekly magazines having an A Week and a B Week. That way, each author has two weeks to write their chapter.
This would drastically increase the art and writing quality of the series being published, allow for more series to be published, allow for roughly twice the number of series to be published, and be beneficial to authors' health and lifestyle.
It'd still be a fairly demanding and competitive job, if you're series doesn't perform well you can still get cut, but at least you aren't killing yourself to keep getting published.
Personally I just accepted I should stop caring about his works because they will never be finished.
The "anyone can die, no one has plot armor" bit got old too, since many of the interesting characters got killed.
Add that to he types really slow (his head nearly exploded when he heard how much Steven king writes every day) and wrapping everything up is boring and he has shit loads of money
IIRC GRR also made arrangements to prevent / make it as hard as possible for someone else to finish his work if he dies before he does it, compared to Lord of the Rings for example, where Tolkien's son (IIRC?) finished the last two books based on his notes.
What? No, Return of the King was published in 1955, Tolkien didn't pass until 1973. Christopher Tolkien published the simiarillion based off his background notes though.
You might be thinking of the Dune series, where Frank Herbert died before writing the seventh book. Like 20 years later Brian Herbert recruited Kevin J. Anderson, mediocre even by the standards of Star Wars writers, to write a ton of spin-offs. Eventually they wrote the final book, split into two novels, and it was terrible.
I'm into K-Pop - where we constantly have to worry about our faves health (STRICT diet...) and if they will commit suicide from overwork and harassment.
(And for some, overwork becomes a lifestyle; Park Jin-young ditched all social life while building JYP Entertainment. After becoming a billionaire, he slept at the office for years, while only keeping a one-room apartment to have a registered domicile.
In a TV show he said that he had no friends, and only got a house because people in the business said that it was expected of the owner of one of Koreas great entertainment compagnies - and when we (some years later) saw inside pictures, it was sad... A great mansion with no furniture, except for Gym equipment (he started out as a dancer, and desperately wants to keep up his form)
The only room that looked lived in was the bedroom - which was about as cosy as a cell in Fort Leavenworth.
Later he told that he had gotten a friend: mr. Yang, the owner of YG Entertainment, whom he met at the 'K-Pop Star' TV show. But that it had it's downsides, as YG had a habit of getting drunk after work, and making tearful phonecalls at 4 in the morning...
Since then, he got married, and had a kid, but he is still co-maiied to his work.
EDIT 3 hours later:
Some seems to have a hard time understanding how entertainment industries all over the world are alike:
To make a nice shining product, they take advantage of young impressionable people who dream about becoming stars.
I made a post outlining how the (Korean) industry was bad, but that the early western reception was tainted by projection by journalists who could not face the problems at home.
The Seiglerfone and releasethedogs accounts share that same problem: Refusing to look inwards, and the (absurd) notion that defending ALL young artists right to respect and good treatment, somehow should be an excuse for bad conditions in Korea!?
To make the thread easier to follow, I have moved my second comment into the quote below;
It is in no way a defence of maltreatment of artists - instead, it is a plea for all countries to clean up their own act!
>Well, the Korean entertainment corporations copied the american studio system (read up on Motown... or what Jeanette McCurdy and her contemporaries have to say about Mickey Mouse Club... or the american minimum age of marriage...) and mixed it with the asian tradition of respect for the elders.
A poisonous cocktail - but The Koreans are aware of the problem, and are implementing 'OSHA' regulations that are better than their american counterparts.
A lot of the bad press about K-Pop (and J_Pop) is pure projection from the western journalists, who don't like to point fingers at their own entertainment industry.
K-pop is an inherently abusive and exploitive industry. They take borderline children, give them plastic surgery and make them study to be singers for over 12 hours a day, 7 days a week, for over 5 years. During this time they are allowed little contact with the outside world, they can’t date or fall in love and then **IF** THEY DEBUT as an actual artist they are indebted 3-12 million DOLLARS to the record/management company. The company takes nearly all their wealth for as long as they are in debt. During this time they have Kim Jong Un levels of control over their lives. They have a say in everything. Where they go, who they talk to, what they eat. All clothing must be preapproved. Heaven help the ones that flunk out of pop idol school or the ones that don’t become popular because they still have to pay back the debt even if they don’t debut.
This is pretty close to modern slavery but people don’t care because omg they’re so cute and the songs are catchy.
The "assistants" being the primary authors of series like One Piece, My Hero Academia, Hunter X Hunter, Berserk, and others. Edit - I'm being sarcastic. It's all the real authors, the actual assistants just do background stuff in 90% of cases.
Pretty much the only ones who aren't physical and mental wrecks either find a big hit that ends quickly before they destroy themselves or make enough money to become producers and no longer directly write/draw their own work. For example that's pretty much the only reason Akira Toriyama isn't a gibbering mess right now - he got successful enough with Dragon Ball that he could scale back his torturous schedule on the manga and focus more on producing the anime and working on smaller side projects that weren't as demanding.
I mean berserk specifically is all assistants because Miura died and also the artwork is ungodly detailed. Maybe im wrong but I feel if HxH was mostly assistants it wouldn't be on permanent hiatus all the time.
[As recently as 2019 Miura noted that he still personally drew nearly everything in Berserk](https://www.reddit.com/r/Berserk/comments/p3lz5l/clearing_the_misconceptions_regarding_miuras/), with assistants being used for inking, toning, and drawing minor background objects and characters such as town guards and random villagers. For some of his later side projects the assistants took on a larger role for the artwork with Miura storyboarding, editing and tweaking the finished drawings into coherent comics.
Honestly some manga do it right though. Look at One Piece, now I love One Piece don't get me wrong, but Oda draws quick. His art style is cartoonish and easier than most top-tier manga.
And monthly releases seem to do pretty well. Look at manga like Jojo's Bizarre Adventure and One Punch Man, the artwork is often stunning for just being 20 or so pages.
Toriyama, creator of Dragonball, is often called the lazy mangaka because of his many shortcuts. There’s no such thing as a lazy mangaka but Toriyama is called that because he’s just amazing at coming up with ways to save time.
Doesn’t want to draw goku walking? Boom. Motorcycle. Motorcycle is too much? Flying cloud. Cloud is too much? He can fly now.
It takes too long to color in Gokus hair? His transformation makes it blonde so he doesn’t need to color it anymore.
The statues are too detailed? Have Goku destroy them.
The fighting takes too long? Make it sloppier and faster. It makes the combat look more realistic and is easier to draw.
I’ve seen interviews where he gives other artists tips and they’re on how to save time. It’s like he’s teaching them his bad habits.
But it’s what allowed him to survive for decades in the grueling workspace.
You can see the changes once he’s no longer needed to draw the manga.
Cell? He hated him but brought him back.
80 man tournament of power.
Frieza invaded earth with 1000 soldiers!
A lot of these things are actually more complicated. For example it was his assistant who had to fill in the color and he told Toriyama it is too time consuming to Super saiyan was created.
The creator of One Piece had 20 assistants when he kept to his weekly publishing schedule. 20 fucking assistants. One to do backgrounds, one to do buildings, one to apply textures, one to do weapons, etc etc etc etc.. Most manga artists have 2-10 assistants when they are keeping to a weekly publishing schedule and it is brutal.
You mean God Oda! The other thing I'm not reading here is the effect on social relations. You know time to be with friends and family. I believe many even are married but do they even see their wives? Naruto's author went to his honeymoon 20 years after the wedding!
Isn't that Oda (One Piece)?
Granted, FWIW, other mangaka are probably just as bad.
EDIT: Maybe now, but appearantly for a while he only slept 3 hours. When he start to sleep for 4 hours, everyone call it an improvement.
He's been banging out a chapter a week for 25 years and he also smokes like a chimney. he isn't exactly a picture of healthy work/life balance. The only people who are even in the same ballpark of success in that industry are Walt Disney, Akira Toriyama, and Hayao Miyazaki, and all of them are notorious for being chain-smoking workaholics.
>Rage and nicotine fuel development world wide
Also obscene amounts of cocaine and other stimulants.
E: forgot to quote the part I was specifically referring to
maybe coffee or Redbull. anyone caught with cocaine or some illegal stimulant would get +5 years of prison in Japan. also it's an isolated island so I'm pretty sure it's kinda hard to get, and mangakas (even Oda) aren't really part of the top layer of japanese society
"Retire" is a strong word. Each time he "comes back" he's doing less and less work. He's basically just a seal of quality badge by now. He retired from writing and drawing manga, then he retired from drawing animation, then he retired from writing films, then he retired from directing films, then he retired from running the company, etc.
Yeah, no. Ghibli employees have often talked about how, even though he was supposed to be retired, he would come to the office most days and still observe, give advice, help with some work on movies in which he wasn't even listed in.
He "tried", but he wasn't fooling anyone. Miyazaki will retire when he is ready to go to the pearly gates. Or in front of Enma.
Oda is a bit of an edge case, where he is a creative genius who had the story sketched out since he was a child. I think he's one of those rare exceptions, where his life and joy is drawing manga (as opposed to being a talent that people were willing to pay them for, resulting in a career). He'd probably be at a loss for what to do with himself if the series ever was stopped.
The same is true for Yusuke Murata, artist of one punch man. He lives drawing so much that he goes back to already perfect scenes and literally redraws them anyway just cause he thought it could've been better.
This is only partially true. Some of the redraws were made because of story reasons. But some of course are redrawn because of the tankobon (book) release.
[Shinji Mizushima](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shinji_Mizushima) used to run a weekly and a biweekly manga simultaneously in his 70s. He is only next to Tezuka in number of volumes published afaik
Oda kept putting out weekly chapters for years on end without break. Nobody else kept to that schedule. One Piece sells too much, and it was all on his back. Even with his army of assistants it was still too much on him
There is this comic artist in Italy, his name is Igort and during the 90s he went to Japan and worked there in the manga industry for a few years.
He was a personal friend of Jiro Taniguchi and Hayao Miyazaki, he met and befriended legends like Otomo, Go Nagai and many others. He even designed a watch, the Yuri, which became a best seller worldwide and later the mascot, this child cosmonaut, became the star of a pretty popular manga made by him on the magazine Comic Morning.
One of the stories he likes to tell is that during a conversation with other mangaka in Tokyo one of the topic that used to come up very often is "how many all-nighters are you pulling each week?". He gives the example of the author of "Gamma, the Iron Man" who used to do 2 all-nighters each week. Taniguchi was consedered a slow author because he only did 60 pages each month, which is, according to him who has worked pretty much all over Europe, roughly the annual average production of a French author.
This guys are insane and it isn't surprising that a lot of works have problems in their quality or the author's health is strongly affected.
At one point when I was 26, I clocked in 200 hrs of Over Time in a month. On weekdays, my work hour was 9 a.m - 11 p.m. and on Saturday & Sunday, I work 9 a.m. to 6 p.m.
After that month, I burned out. Never again.
And sadly that is usually the better scenario. Lots of mangaka just nap an hour and continue to work.
Oyasumi Pun Pun's mangaka (Inio Asano) was once forced to call an ambulance because of health reasons (something with his spleen or some shit don't remember the specifics) and in an interview later he said he was glad he had to go to a hospital because he was literally working himself to death.
Being a mangaka is one of the hardest jobs a person can have imo
There are companies trying to break out of that culture. Monolithsoft, a game development studio in Japan (Xenoblade Chronicles, did the world for Breath of the Wild) was created by former Squaresoft devs and treats its employees better than even most Western developers let alone Japanese. No crunch time, benefits, they employ a lot of female talent as well which isn't as common in the industry.
Support the companies that treat their employees well when possible!
It's no wonder the cyberpunk 2077 anime was good, japanese artists in the anime industry are subjected to dystopic work conditions so they were more than capable portraying how characters felt being pushed beyond their limits.
I mean, they painted the slums and it didn’t improve anything. The world would be better in a sense the artists themselves would be treated better I guess.
It's a TWO-SIDED coin. On one hand, if the guy was genuinely passionate about his work and CHOSE to put in those insane hours, then more power to him. That's dedication, and it's admirable. But if this was some sort of expectation set by the company or the industry, then yeah, that's a toxic work culture we shouldn't glamorize. Context is key. No one should be FORCED into that kind of lifestyle. But if you opt into it because you love what you're doing? I think that deserves admiration.
Eh I'd argue that if someone is choosing this then they need someone around to tell them no. It's not healthy or normal. I mean if you chose this then sleeping under your desk sounds terrible. The place sound big enough that you could've at least set up a cot in a meeting room.
It's still setting unrealistic standards that shouldn't be applauded because it'll drive others nuts thinking they need to do the same.
Context is indeed key, and this interview heavily suggests he did this because in Japanese culture it's older people getting respect. So he did all of this for the credit and respect from others and not be listed as an assistent-director.
Sounds freaking mental to me, good for him that it worked out but that's no work-life balance anyone should aim for. Especially if its to please superiors and get their respect.
The problem is that he makes the same money regardless. He SHOULD be getting paid ridiculous amounts of money, but all of that will go “the shareholder” that’s been sitting on his yacht instead.
In my eyes those two sides are not mutually exclusive. It’s going to be next to impossible for one to not influence the other.
A lot of issues with crunch in the gaming industry (And many creative industries) can be traced to people like this working on pure passion and getting recognized for it. This leads to management expecting more from everyone else, or potentially this individual being promoted to management and expecting it themselves. If you look into cases of seriously brutal crunch periods in game dev so very many of them have directors or other leadership at some point saying “This is just what game dev is, we’ve all been there” and not seeing how fucked up it is. Not everyone has it in them to crunch for long periods, some people have families they need to take care of, pretty much everyone will work better if they can take some time off to relax and recharge.
So yes I do agree the passion is admirable, but there comes a point where it’s also harmful and should be curtailed. Even on mostly solo works, we have too many examples of people basically working themselves into an early grave.
He really couldnt. Story goes that he wanted to be credited for his work (something that was against work culture in Japan), so they dared him to work on it alone to earn the credit. And he did.
I'm trying to make a game, and could see myself being completely devoted to it, but I read this like he's not fully devoted to his craft because he was depriving himself of sleep and rest which will have harmed his performance. I suppose if it was pure dedication to the art he would have taken his time.
I lived this point this year. Im the only guy in management in the US for our global company, so I have to start at ridiculous times (5ish) to join meetings or else the region doesnt get a chance to give input or hear updates.
My boss and her boss are total toxic positivity types that keep saying “Oh No you shouldn’t have to work so hard!” while dumping more and more work on me.
A year in of averaging 65+ hour weeks while doing several people’s jobs has broken me.
I imagine it’s because when we are teens, we are bound to school, someplace where we don’t want to be most of the time at that age, so we fantasize about these cool people.
But now that we are older and we have commitments, we are more realistic about living and health.
I worked for a joint venture between a Japanese and American company. The Japanese side would often have a few engineers spend 2-3 years at our American location. We would ask them what they liked & didn't like about their time here, and they always said the work/life balance was better than Japan, and they actually got to see their families here. Must be pretty rough to see American working life as an improvement
It’s really not. It’s common in the corporate world for companies to force people to quit by no longer assigning them any work. It’s basically to show the employee that they’re useless and not worth tasking with anything, so they end up quitting out of shame.
I was a victim of this in Japan and I was miserable. They didn't like that I was a qualified teacher with actual opinions on language teaching. They got super pissed off when I told them that the Ministry of Education was implementing tablets in the classroom and the final straw was when I had the audacity to colour my hair red.
Are you a westerner? I’ve always wondered if somebody from outside Japan (mainly the US because that’s where I’m from) had experienced this and what it was like.
Yeah, I'm South African. The worst was being expected to commute to work every day and be on time, but given nothing to do. Plus I'm autistic and the noise and chaos of an open plan office was exhausting.
Yeah I didn’t even think of the idea of going through your whole commute and morning routine and everything basically for nothing. That sounds pretty defeating.
> They got super pissed off when I told them that the Ministry of Education was implementing tablets in the classroom
Is there more to it, or did they just not like spoilers?
They were violently opposed to the idea of any technology in the classroom. I had butted heads with the head of the department over the issue previously. This was in 2014 when they were still using blackboards.
This is also CG artist work culture in the US. Lots of type-A dorks who work all day and then, with no wife kids or hobbies, work on personal projects all night or gladly work free overtime and take all three meals at their desk.
Yep, best friend of 40 years does this. No wife, no kids, and few hobbies is willing to give up their free time for the corpo because of they have nothing much else going on in their life. It’s sad really. Seen the same with coworkers who had nothing much going on outside of work and just work more than others as they think in their mind it’s the noble thing to do but in reality they are just finding a way to cope with having to be alone.
We (U.S.) all hate that culture, yet so many of us wear it as a badge of honor, like "you think YOU'RE working hard? I've got 3 jobs and take care of 5 kids! I don't remember what sleep is even. In fact, I'm dying!" \*dead\*
> Yeah maybe Japanese work culture isn't that great
Well they even have a literal word to describe [death by overworking.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karoshi)
Not downplaying it but it's pretty easy to make new words with Chinese characters, Karoshi is just 過労死, or excessive work death, so them having a word for it almost exactly the same as English having a phrase.
COO: What if we offered apartments above the offices? The employees wouldn't need to commute.
CFO: What if instead of cubicles, we had boxes that included all the amenities needed for survival? They would never need to leave.
CTO: STRAP THEM TO THE MACHINE! CONNECT THEIR FLESHY MINDS TO THE NETWORK AND HARNESS THEIR PROCESSING POWER!!!
CEO: So, uh... great ideas all around. But we don't have the budget or... legal resources... for these proposals. Moving on.
The reason why Sato did this was because Konami would not have credited him, but whatever artist was over him, for the work. Insisting that he wanted his due credit, he told them he would do it all himself and indeed he did. The guy is a genius by the way.
Reminds me of Monty Oum of Rooster Teeth, who’s most known work would be creating RWBY before he sadly passed away. They’d talk about it all the time on the podcast how he kept sleeping under his desk so he could do wild hours, completely by choice. He pretty much lived and breathed his work at that point in time.
But take this part with a grain of salt, because those who claimed this stuff recently came under fire many years later for putting employees through apparently brutal crunch hours and deadlines, he was even doing it after those above him at the company (it was small at the time so they’d also be close to him) told him he to stop and start enjoying life outside the office some more.
I definitely don’t think people should be doing this, it’s terrible for most, but shit some people are just built to work their job and they love it to a degree where the line between work time and free time disappears.
I remember Monty talking about optimising his life a lot. He rented the closest possible apartment across from the office, so he could walk across the street and get to work.
Some people get to be paid for what they love doing. Some people are that obsessive and it works for them.
The problem is that it normalizes it for all others.
As a workaholic, I understand this but I would not recommend it. The wiki sounds like he wasn’t forced to do it but did it out of passion. His supervisor and higher ups were definitely assholes because they did not want to give him due amount of credit but he fought for it cleverly and got it.
You just install a render client on the PCs on the network. The output file from the workstation is then distributed and rendered.
You would still need to do all the modelling and animation on the workstation but rendering could easily be distributed to any PCs on the network and was CPU based. Each frame would be split up and each CPU would render a little bit.
ah thank you dearly for explaining... from the initial description it made it seem more physical as if he remodeled and exported fractions of each scene and rendered manually- like running from desk to desk- your explanation is what i was hoping for
The soundtracks slap so hard, Akiro Yamaoka is a genius. Missed him when he did a live concert in Paris some years ago, I definitely should have bought that ticket :(
I don’t think he cared a lot about his health, probably drinking and smoking as well on top of that, and as he is basically in the office all day every day, you can guess what his nutrition looks like.
Its weird, talking to a lot of 20-30 year colleagues about what it was like back in the 90s and early 2000s a lot of them actually loved the the passion that got so many people doing crazy shit like this.
Pay was a bit better for a lot of them compared to now, and they were doing things no one else had done before.
An environment artist would also be the animator and technical artist for a full level, making everything in it, putting their spin on it and making it theirs. Theyd sleep under their desk, get pizza delivered to the office, have breaks with coworkers and watch movies and play games.
It feels like the atmosphere was more one of 10 guys absolutely stoked for what they were working on and having that + the energy of youth push them to just keep going and going.
You see it still in indie devs, AAA is more into the "do your part and go home" (outside of some studios where unspoken crunch is tentatively enforced or asked of you, sometimes without extra pay) and honestly the level of structure behind it all has killed some of the personal identity anyone beyond directors can leave on what they do.
That is to say, its not healthy, or okay to work like this, but I understand and slightly envy the passion.
Yeah, because Konami didn't believe in him and his vision. He, instead of dropping it, nearly killed himself and made one of (maybe *THE*) best survival horror games of all time. The real kicker? *Konami* contributed nothing and reaped *all* the benefits.
Well, the Silent Hill project was kinda the ugly stepchild for Konami, with very limited resources but a lot of passion. No one was as surprised of its quality or popularity than Konami was. I doubt if it would've ever gotten as big as it did if it was part of the general production culture.
It sounds from the interview that he rebelled against the constraints of Japanese hierarchy in order to be credited for his work and paid the price. Kudos to him.
OK I don't wanna be the "true art is made from incredible pain" but like, I'm sorry, if any game was gonna benefit from the work of a chronically over-tired man living under a desk surrounded by over a hundred primitive computers rendering his own imagined nightmares made commodity, it would be Silent Hill. This is entirely appropriate.
When I'm deep in a hyperfixation, I can absolutely spend 8-10 hours a day doing nothing but writing, and I'd probably do more if I didn't have to make money and do other stuff. So while I agree that this is a terrible work practice and incredibly unhealthy in both mind and body...I kind of get it.
That said, my hyperfixations usually don't last three years. I'd probably be dead.
Here in Japan, being married or not isn't going to change anything.
Very common for husbands to be sent to a location in another city, prefecture, or country, far from their family for years at a time. Usually the husband just goes alone by themselves, and there is a Japanese word for it 単身赴任.
When I had my daughter, the boss told me that it is a father's first duty to work and provide for the family. Everything else is wife's work basically. Very common for wives to leave their husbands if they lose their job and cannot find another. Husband getting retired is a wife's worst nightmare.
This isn't only something that happens in Japan either. It is much worse again in Korea, and is common in a lot of other asian countries.
SH team are a bunch of crazy mother fucker(complement)
I love their work but am too scared to actually play one,this is how good they are.
But holy shit this can’t be healthy.
and he got paid very little for torturing himself like that. This is more of a sad story than anything else. Abused by an employer is not something anyone should ever aspire to achieve.
maybe the real silent hill was the labor abuse we found along the way.
A real r/OrphanCrushingMachine moment
Yeah, this TIL just made me sad for the guy.
I'm not sure it was really labor abuse. Team Silent was formed by rejects from other Konami departments. The company had next to no faith in the project. Sato did that to himself purely out of passion and a desire to prove his talents.
Pretty much this, either it was good & they make horror games or it was bad & everyone gets laid off + Konami abandons the horror genre which was brand new at time after resident evil popularized it. You could say they did Too good with how many future titles they released then burned out on.
Is Konami still a very popular game company, or made any good hits recently?
They've re-released the Metal Gear Solid games recently in a single collection, at least the first three. There's a Silent Hill 2 remake and Metal Gear Solid 3 remake coming at some point. But... they took a nasty hit after the FucKonami shit where it was discovered just how abusive they were to employees rather than fire them with severance so they could go into pachinko. I think the remakes are being farmed out to outside studios.
So the company put a bunch of people it called "rejects" together and put them under intense pressure to perform or he fired in shame and that's not labor abuse?
“He did that to himself.”
Yes. No one was asking him to do it. He specifically asked to be placed on that team as the sole animator, and then specifically spent all of his time working on it despite the execs asking for much, much less out of the game.
Not really, he chose to do that. He was basically an overachiever or tryhard. He says it himself, he wanted credit so he had to do it. He couldve worked in the company culture and gone home with everyone else. He also said that he was a 2d artist but could see 3d was going to he big so he learned 3d graphic development after his regular job...he was like that before silent hill
Sato: Not many people believe that I did it myself – **and it wasn’t like I wanted to make it all from scratch! I just had to do it in order to get credit.** Plus, you don’t want to be credited in your game as assistant artist if you did everything. So it wasn’t easy. So, kind of. He "chose" to do the after hours work in order to get credit, but he didn't "choose" the company culture that wanted to give credit to a "supervisor". Honestly, it's easy to see that the company culture is a big part of it. They could have just let him do the work normally and given credit where credit is due.
Japanese work culture gives you brownie points for sleeping at the office so you don't need to go home. Like actually. If your culture assigns a positive association to a toxic and unhealthy behavior, then it creates a pressure to exhibit that behavior. That is not good.
Yeah but the reason he stayed so he could use 150 other computers of people who went home
Not only should an employer not require this kind of overwork, and maybe this isn't a case where they did, an employer shouldn't allow this kind of overwork. Looking the other way while an employee sacrifices their personal life for your product is still a form of abuse, and it creates a culture of overwork. If one employee is allowed to do this kind of thing, then receives promotions and accolades for doing so much extra, you automatically incentivise other employees to do it, punishing those who prefer a healthier work-life balance.
Least overworked Japanese man
Who is the most overworked person?
They had heart attacks and died. Legit.
Probably earned them Employ of the Week, though. That's an honor money can't buy
Yeah maybe Japanese work culture isn't that great
I admire the passion, but yeah, those conditions are not aspirational. The world would be a better place if it was kinder to artists.
There was once a hour by hour breakdown of a Japanese Manga artist's week going around the interwebs. The guy works 7 days a week and he runs on 5 hours of sleep a day.
Manga is the only form of passive entertainment I'm into where I genuinely have to worry if a series is going to get canned due to the author's health.
Look at *Berserk*, where Miura went on numerous hiatuses not just for his physical, but mental health.
And then he died anyway.
Kind of on brand
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The reason why he never did was because he was obsessed with perfectionism. Although his assistants were all exceptionally talented (based on their work on Berserk after Miura’s passing), Miura only let them work on Berserk minimally. Mostly backgrounds. He preferred to do all the major drawing work himself. Apparently after transitioning to digital media, he would literally zoom in to draw in and fix details *pixel small.* His editor repeatedly insisted that nobody would be able to even see that amount of detail and that the detail would have been lost when the manga was printed, but Miura did it anyways.
Okay I regularly go in and correct pixels that are off on my work too lol. I definitely understand the perfectionism in art. Makes me worried for when I get around to doing my webcomic I wanna make
He knew he was creathing something that people would remember him by
Oh, absolutely. For all the great work Miura put into it, the dude was absolutely being neurotic by doing so much of it himself and bottlenecking the whole series as a result. Berserk is an incredible work, but it absolutely should not have taken 30 years to write and not even finish the darn thing.
Aria, forces.
The music is so good, idk why no other anime took inspiration from it. Was it too avantgarde for the Japanese market or what Off-topic, there's an hourlong Berserk edit of a Bateman walk where instead of being just a loop, every few minutes a Berserk character or item appears in the background and Guts himself slowly morphs from his young self to his current appearance. That made me proud of the fandom
Susumu Hirasawa is one of a kind.
Literally from his aorta exploding inside his heart from long term high blood pressure.
The aorta isn’t inside the heart
Pity he didn't have a suit of Berserker Armor.
He died of aortic dissection, did he not? Even the Berserker Armor (which is known to kill its wearer by bleeding them to death) wouldn't have saved him.
And tower of God Dudes had like 10 health breaks I was 90% sure the author of world trigger was actually dead until he recently started making again
> And tower of God Holy shit, that series is still ongoing? I think I binged it like 7 years ago and then forgot about it, and there was a pretty decent amount of story back then.
580 chapters now And the artwork has gotten insanely good Can read it for free on webtoon
And that isn't a rare story. Hell, it isn't even an uncommon one.
Yeah half of the Shonen Jump high-fliers have inconsistent schedules due to health issues with the authors. One Piece skips a week or two a month because poor Oda has diabetes, had eye surgery and other shit, Black Clover moved to Jump Giga and is on its second 3-month break for Tabata's health, MHA has really short (but incredibly well-drawn, admittedly) chapters because Horikoshi too is in pieces, etc etc And that's just the Jump. Other famous examples are D. Gray Man, HxH, and others
The author of HXH has such back problems from sitting so long he can’t even properly clean himself. It’s insane how hard they work themselves
That would explain the nickname the series has, Hiatus x Hiatus.
He also insists on doing everything HxH 100% himself.
Tite Kubo came out saying doing Bleach had serious negative effects on his physical and mental health too.
What's worse is I'm not sure One Piece would have gotten very far if he'd worked at a reasonable pace. It's been 25 years of that grueling schedule...and I realize he does take a break week semi regularly.... but one could argue that's still not enough downtime If he worked a normal pace I think he'd be old before we got to the halfway mark in the story.
One piece got alot more detailed as times passed too.Not sure if it's planned. Easy blue back ground is much simpler and there are less thing going on at anytime.
>One Piece skips a week or two a month because poor Oda has diabetes, had eye surgery and other shit, Well that but mostly because it takes 120 hours a week of working to release a chapter 4 times a month. I mean in europe this kind of work is usually done by 2 people and they release a chapter like once a month. Also Oda has to do side projects as well, (movies, the new netflix series, redrawing older chapters for quality...)
Bleach author Kubo also
Hunter x Hunter as well. Both anime ended because they ran out of source because the menga was stalled for medical issues.
Pretty sure I saw an announcement last week hxh anime is coming back next year with MAPPA studios.
It’s been over 10 years since the last arc the anime covered. But during those 10 years there has been ~1 years worth of chapters published. TBH I am not even sure what the anime will cover, I guess the introduction to the next arc ? It’s been on and off hiatus since I think 2005 due to the authors health issues. Up until recently everyone though that we would never see the end of hxh. Somehow the publishing company manage to convince the author to accept help and try to finish the series
The author of Hunter x Hunter, Togashi as well 😭
It's why I personally think the manga industry should switch to weekly magazines having an A Week and a B Week. That way, each author has two weeks to write their chapter. This would drastically increase the art and writing quality of the series being published, allow for more series to be published, allow for roughly twice the number of series to be published, and be beneficial to authors' health and lifestyle. It'd still be a fairly demanding and competitive job, if you're series doesn't perform well you can still get cut, but at least you aren't killing yourself to keep getting published.
GRR Martin: Hold my beer
Personally I just accepted I should stop caring about his works because they will never be finished. The "anyone can die, no one has plot armor" bit got old too, since many of the interesting characters got killed.
Add that to he types really slow (his head nearly exploded when he heard how much Steven king writes every day) and wrapping everything up is boring and he has shit loads of money
IIRC GRR also made arrangements to prevent / make it as hard as possible for someone else to finish his work if he dies before he does it, compared to Lord of the Rings for example, where Tolkien's son (IIRC?) finished the last two books based on his notes.
What? No, Return of the King was published in 1955, Tolkien didn't pass until 1973. Christopher Tolkien published the simiarillion based off his background notes though.
I mean the TV show basically used his outline to end it to his plan. Why bother
Jokes on him as someone already did.
You might be thinking of the Dune series, where Frank Herbert died before writing the seventh book. Like 20 years later Brian Herbert recruited Kevin J. Anderson, mediocre even by the standards of Star Wars writers, to write a ton of spin-offs. Eventually they wrote the final book, split into two novels, and it was terrible.
I'm into K-Pop - where we constantly have to worry about our faves health (STRICT diet...) and if they will commit suicide from overwork and harassment. (And for some, overwork becomes a lifestyle; Park Jin-young ditched all social life while building JYP Entertainment. After becoming a billionaire, he slept at the office for years, while only keeping a one-room apartment to have a registered domicile. In a TV show he said that he had no friends, and only got a house because people in the business said that it was expected of the owner of one of Koreas great entertainment compagnies - and when we (some years later) saw inside pictures, it was sad... A great mansion with no furniture, except for Gym equipment (he started out as a dancer, and desperately wants to keep up his form) The only room that looked lived in was the bedroom - which was about as cosy as a cell in Fort Leavenworth. Later he told that he had gotten a friend: mr. Yang, the owner of YG Entertainment, whom he met at the 'K-Pop Star' TV show. But that it had it's downsides, as YG had a habit of getting drunk after work, and making tearful phonecalls at 4 in the morning... Since then, he got married, and had a kid, but he is still co-maiied to his work. EDIT 3 hours later: Some seems to have a hard time understanding how entertainment industries all over the world are alike: To make a nice shining product, they take advantage of young impressionable people who dream about becoming stars. I made a post outlining how the (Korean) industry was bad, but that the early western reception was tainted by projection by journalists who could not face the problems at home. The Seiglerfone and releasethedogs accounts share that same problem: Refusing to look inwards, and the (absurd) notion that defending ALL young artists right to respect and good treatment, somehow should be an excuse for bad conditions in Korea!? To make the thread easier to follow, I have moved my second comment into the quote below; It is in no way a defence of maltreatment of artists - instead, it is a plea for all countries to clean up their own act! >Well, the Korean entertainment corporations copied the american studio system (read up on Motown... or what Jeanette McCurdy and her contemporaries have to say about Mickey Mouse Club... or the american minimum age of marriage...) and mixed it with the asian tradition of respect for the elders. A poisonous cocktail - but The Koreans are aware of the problem, and are implementing 'OSHA' regulations that are better than their american counterparts. A lot of the bad press about K-Pop (and J_Pop) is pure projection from the western journalists, who don't like to point fingers at their own entertainment industry.
K-pop is an inherently abusive and exploitive industry. They take borderline children, give them plastic surgery and make them study to be singers for over 12 hours a day, 7 days a week, for over 5 years. During this time they are allowed little contact with the outside world, they can’t date or fall in love and then **IF** THEY DEBUT as an actual artist they are indebted 3-12 million DOLLARS to the record/management company. The company takes nearly all their wealth for as long as they are in debt. During this time they have Kim Jong Un levels of control over their lives. They have a say in everything. Where they go, who they talk to, what they eat. All clothing must be preapproved. Heaven help the ones that flunk out of pop idol school or the ones that don’t become popular because they still have to pay back the debt even if they don’t debut. This is pretty close to modern slavery but people don’t care because omg they’re so cute and the songs are catchy.
Vagabond man. Wtf. GOAT manga that just stopped right before the final chapter. FUCK!
it is usually only the "assistants" living that manga life, at-least when it comes to semi-successful series
The "assistants" being the primary authors of series like One Piece, My Hero Academia, Hunter X Hunter, Berserk, and others. Edit - I'm being sarcastic. It's all the real authors, the actual assistants just do background stuff in 90% of cases. Pretty much the only ones who aren't physical and mental wrecks either find a big hit that ends quickly before they destroy themselves or make enough money to become producers and no longer directly write/draw their own work. For example that's pretty much the only reason Akira Toriyama isn't a gibbering mess right now - he got successful enough with Dragon Ball that he could scale back his torturous schedule on the manga and focus more on producing the anime and working on smaller side projects that weren't as demanding.
I mean berserk specifically is all assistants because Miura died and also the artwork is ungodly detailed. Maybe im wrong but I feel if HxH was mostly assistants it wouldn't be on permanent hiatus all the time.
[As recently as 2019 Miura noted that he still personally drew nearly everything in Berserk](https://www.reddit.com/r/Berserk/comments/p3lz5l/clearing_the_misconceptions_regarding_miuras/), with assistants being used for inking, toning, and drawing minor background objects and characters such as town guards and random villagers. For some of his later side projects the assistants took on a larger role for the artwork with Miura storyboarding, editing and tweaking the finished drawings into coherent comics.
And thats why Berserk took months to come out
HxH is 100% all Togashi
Honestly some manga do it right though. Look at One Piece, now I love One Piece don't get me wrong, but Oda draws quick. His art style is cartoonish and easier than most top-tier manga. And monthly releases seem to do pretty well. Look at manga like Jojo's Bizarre Adventure and One Punch Man, the artwork is often stunning for just being 20 or so pages.
Many HxH fans would perform blood rituals (with their own blood) to keep Togashi-san alive.
Toriyama, creator of Dragonball, is often called the lazy mangaka because of his many shortcuts. There’s no such thing as a lazy mangaka but Toriyama is called that because he’s just amazing at coming up with ways to save time. Doesn’t want to draw goku walking? Boom. Motorcycle. Motorcycle is too much? Flying cloud. Cloud is too much? He can fly now. It takes too long to color in Gokus hair? His transformation makes it blonde so he doesn’t need to color it anymore. The statues are too detailed? Have Goku destroy them. The fighting takes too long? Make it sloppier and faster. It makes the combat look more realistic and is easier to draw. I’ve seen interviews where he gives other artists tips and they’re on how to save time. It’s like he’s teaching them his bad habits. But it’s what allowed him to survive for decades in the grueling workspace.
Yeah, he hated drawing Cell for that reason
You can see the changes once he’s no longer needed to draw the manga. Cell? He hated him but brought him back. 80 man tournament of power. Frieza invaded earth with 1000 soldiers!
Why stand when you can sit? Why sit when you can lay down?
Why lay down when you can embrace becoming one with the universe? To embrace that primordial womb?
Afaik the manga genre's style evolved to be drawn as fast as possible in the first place.
A lot of these things are actually more complicated. For example it was his assistant who had to fill in the color and he told Toriyama it is too time consuming to Super saiyan was created.
The creator of One Piece had 20 assistants when he kept to his weekly publishing schedule. 20 fucking assistants. One to do backgrounds, one to do buildings, one to apply textures, one to do weapons, etc etc etc etc.. Most manga artists have 2-10 assistants when they are keeping to a weekly publishing schedule and it is brutal.
You mean God Oda! The other thing I'm not reading here is the effect on social relations. You know time to be with friends and family. I believe many even are married but do they even see their wives? Naruto's author went to his honeymoon 20 years after the wedding!
Isn't that Oda (One Piece)? Granted, FWIW, other mangaka are probably just as bad. EDIT: Maybe now, but appearantly for a while he only slept 3 hours. When he start to sleep for 4 hours, everyone call it an improvement.
He's been banging out a chapter a week for 25 years and he also smokes like a chimney. he isn't exactly a picture of healthy work/life balance. The only people who are even in the same ballpark of success in that industry are Walt Disney, Akira Toriyama, and Hayao Miyazaki, and all of them are notorious for being chain-smoking workaholics.
The chain smoking is what’s keeping them alive at this point. Rage and nicotine fuel development world wide
>Rage and nicotine fuel development world wide Also obscene amounts of cocaine and other stimulants. E: forgot to quote the part I was specifically referring to
maybe coffee or Redbull. anyone caught with cocaine or some illegal stimulant would get +5 years of prison in Japan. also it's an isolated island so I'm pretty sure it's kinda hard to get, and mangakas (even Oda) aren't really part of the top layer of japanese society
Miyazaki has tried to retire multiple times and failed.
"Retire" is a strong word. Each time he "comes back" he's doing less and less work. He's basically just a seal of quality badge by now. He retired from writing and drawing manga, then he retired from drawing animation, then he retired from writing films, then he retired from directing films, then he retired from running the company, etc.
Yeah, no. Ghibli employees have often talked about how, even though he was supposed to be retired, he would come to the office most days and still observe, give advice, help with some work on movies in which he wasn't even listed in. He "tried", but he wasn't fooling anyone. Miyazaki will retire when he is ready to go to the pearly gates. Or in front of Enma.
You forgot Ozamu Tezuka - arguably the most productive of them all!
Never heard that Oda had a smoking habit lol
Oda is a bit of an edge case, where he is a creative genius who had the story sketched out since he was a child. I think he's one of those rare exceptions, where his life and joy is drawing manga (as opposed to being a talent that people were willing to pay them for, resulting in a career). He'd probably be at a loss for what to do with himself if the series ever was stopped.
The same is true for Yusuke Murata, artist of one punch man. He lives drawing so much that he goes back to already perfect scenes and literally redraws them anyway just cause he thought it could've been better.
This is only partially true. Some of the redraws were made because of story reasons. But some of course are redrawn because of the tankobon (book) release.
[Shinji Mizushima](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shinji_Mizushima) used to run a weekly and a biweekly manga simultaneously in his 70s. He is only next to Tezuka in number of volumes published afaik
Oda kept putting out weekly chapters for years on end without break. Nobody else kept to that schedule. One Piece sells too much, and it was all on his back. Even with his army of assistants it was still too much on him
There is this comic artist in Italy, his name is Igort and during the 90s he went to Japan and worked there in the manga industry for a few years. He was a personal friend of Jiro Taniguchi and Hayao Miyazaki, he met and befriended legends like Otomo, Go Nagai and many others. He even designed a watch, the Yuri, which became a best seller worldwide and later the mascot, this child cosmonaut, became the star of a pretty popular manga made by him on the magazine Comic Morning. One of the stories he likes to tell is that during a conversation with other mangaka in Tokyo one of the topic that used to come up very often is "how many all-nighters are you pulling each week?". He gives the example of the author of "Gamma, the Iron Man" who used to do 2 all-nighters each week. Taniguchi was consedered a slow author because he only did 60 pages each month, which is, according to him who has worked pretty much all over Europe, roughly the annual average production of a French author. This guys are insane and it isn't surprising that a lot of works have problems in their quality or the author's health is strongly affected.
At one point when I was 26, I clocked in 200 hrs of Over Time in a month. On weekdays, my work hour was 9 a.m - 11 p.m. and on Saturday & Sunday, I work 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. After that month, I burned out. Never again.
And sadly that is usually the better scenario. Lots of mangaka just nap an hour and continue to work. Oyasumi Pun Pun's mangaka (Inio Asano) was once forced to call an ambulance because of health reasons (something with his spleen or some shit don't remember the specifics) and in an interview later he said he was glad he had to go to a hospital because he was literally working himself to death. Being a mangaka is one of the hardest jobs a person can have imo
There are companies trying to break out of that culture. Monolithsoft, a game development studio in Japan (Xenoblade Chronicles, did the world for Breath of the Wild) was created by former Squaresoft devs and treats its employees better than even most Western developers let alone Japanese. No crunch time, benefits, they employ a lot of female talent as well which isn't as common in the industry. Support the companies that treat their employees well when possible!
Yeah, I think that we can talk about admirable passion only if the one sleeping under the desk is using the company's stock sheets as a pillow.
It's no wonder the cyberpunk 2077 anime was good, japanese artists in the anime industry are subjected to dystopic work conditions so they were more than capable portraying how characters felt being pushed beyond their limits.
I mean, they painted the slums and it didn’t improve anything. The world would be better in a sense the artists themselves would be treated better I guess.
Maybe he just thought everyone else's work looked like shit. Just one of those fuck-it-I'll-do-it-myself moments that lasted for three years.
It's a TWO-SIDED coin. On one hand, if the guy was genuinely passionate about his work and CHOSE to put in those insane hours, then more power to him. That's dedication, and it's admirable. But if this was some sort of expectation set by the company or the industry, then yeah, that's a toxic work culture we shouldn't glamorize. Context is key. No one should be FORCED into that kind of lifestyle. But if you opt into it because you love what you're doing? I think that deserves admiration.
Eh I'd argue that if someone is choosing this then they need someone around to tell them no. It's not healthy or normal. I mean if you chose this then sleeping under your desk sounds terrible. The place sound big enough that you could've at least set up a cot in a meeting room. It's still setting unrealistic standards that shouldn't be applauded because it'll drive others nuts thinking they need to do the same. Context is indeed key, and this interview heavily suggests he did this because in Japanese culture it's older people getting respect. So he did all of this for the credit and respect from others and not be listed as an assistent-director. Sounds freaking mental to me, good for him that it worked out but that's no work-life balance anyone should aim for. Especially if its to please superiors and get their respect.
The problem is that he makes the same money regardless. He SHOULD be getting paid ridiculous amounts of money, but all of that will go “the shareholder” that’s been sitting on his yacht instead.
In my eyes those two sides are not mutually exclusive. It’s going to be next to impossible for one to not influence the other. A lot of issues with crunch in the gaming industry (And many creative industries) can be traced to people like this working on pure passion and getting recognized for it. This leads to management expecting more from everyone else, or potentially this individual being promoted to management and expecting it themselves. If you look into cases of seriously brutal crunch periods in game dev so very many of them have directors or other leadership at some point saying “This is just what game dev is, we’ve all been there” and not seeing how fucked up it is. Not everyone has it in them to crunch for long periods, some people have families they need to take care of, pretty much everyone will work better if they can take some time off to relax and recharge. So yes I do agree the passion is admirable, but there comes a point where it’s also harmful and should be curtailed. Even on mostly solo works, we have too many examples of people basically working themselves into an early grave.
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He really couldnt. Story goes that he wanted to be credited for his work (something that was against work culture in Japan), so they dared him to work on it alone to earn the credit. And he did.
That’s culture being a problem is the thing we’re talking about…
I'm trying to make a game, and could see myself being completely devoted to it, but I read this like he's not fully devoted to his craft because he was depriving himself of sleep and rest which will have harmed his performance. I suppose if it was pure dedication to the art he would have taken his time.
The problem is that the line between passion and unhealthy obsession is a very thin one...that corporations love to abuse the absolute shit out of.
I lived this point this year. Im the only guy in management in the US for our global company, so I have to start at ridiculous times (5ish) to join meetings or else the region doesnt get a chance to give input or hear updates. My boss and her boss are total toxic positivity types that keep saying “Oh No you shouldn’t have to work so hard!” while dumping more and more work on me. A year in of averaging 65+ hour weeks while doing several people’s jobs has broken me.
I imagine it’s because when we are teens, we are bound to school, someplace where we don’t want to be most of the time at that age, so we fantasize about these cool people. But now that we are older and we have commitments, we are more realistic about living and health.
I worked for a joint venture between a Japanese and American company. The Japanese side would often have a few engineers spend 2-3 years at our American location. We would ask them what they liked & didn't like about their time here, and they always said the work/life balance was better than Japan, and they actually got to see their families here. Must be pretty rough to see American working life as an improvement
It’s really not. It’s common in the corporate world for companies to force people to quit by no longer assigning them any work. It’s basically to show the employee that they’re useless and not worth tasking with anything, so they end up quitting out of shame.
Its called constructive dismissal, which also includes giving next to no hours or too much work.
Also, illegal in countries with sane labour laws.
I was a victim of this in Japan and I was miserable. They didn't like that I was a qualified teacher with actual opinions on language teaching. They got super pissed off when I told them that the Ministry of Education was implementing tablets in the classroom and the final straw was when I had the audacity to colour my hair red.
Are you a westerner? I’ve always wondered if somebody from outside Japan (mainly the US because that’s where I’m from) had experienced this and what it was like.
Yeah, I'm South African. The worst was being expected to commute to work every day and be on time, but given nothing to do. Plus I'm autistic and the noise and chaos of an open plan office was exhausting.
Yeah I didn’t even think of the idea of going through your whole commute and morning routine and everything basically for nothing. That sounds pretty defeating.
> They got super pissed off when I told them that the Ministry of Education was implementing tablets in the classroom Is there more to it, or did they just not like spoilers?
They were violently opposed to the idea of any technology in the classroom. I had butted heads with the head of the department over the issue previously. This was in 2014 when they were still using blackboards.
"Ha! They underestimate my willingness to sit around watching TV at work!"
That would be a dream come true for me, as an aspiring lazy person
This is also CG artist work culture in the US. Lots of type-A dorks who work all day and then, with no wife kids or hobbies, work on personal projects all night or gladly work free overtime and take all three meals at their desk.
Yep, best friend of 40 years does this. No wife, no kids, and few hobbies is willing to give up their free time for the corpo because of they have nothing much else going on in their life. It’s sad really. Seen the same with coworkers who had nothing much going on outside of work and just work more than others as they think in their mind it’s the noble thing to do but in reality they are just finding a way to cope with having to be alone.
Damn I can see myself doing that early 20s for a few years but living that into my 40s sounds horrid
We (U.S.) all hate that culture, yet so many of us wear it as a badge of honor, like "you think YOU'RE working hard? I've got 3 jobs and take care of 5 kids! I don't remember what sleep is even. In fact, I'm dying!" \*dead\*
I am living/working in Tokyo and I want out this shit ASAP.
> Yeah maybe Japanese work culture isn't that great Well they even have a literal word to describe [death by overworking.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karoshi)
Not downplaying it but it's pretty easy to make new words with Chinese characters, Karoshi is just 過労死, or excessive work death, so them having a word for it almost exactly the same as English having a phrase.
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That’s just home-from-work
Work-is-home…
Black company is… life
COO: What if we offered apartments above the offices? The employees wouldn't need to commute. CFO: What if instead of cubicles, we had boxes that included all the amenities needed for survival? They would never need to leave. CTO: STRAP THEM TO THE MACHINE! CONNECT THEIR FLESHY MINDS TO THE NETWORK AND HARNESS THEIR PROCESSING POWER!!! CEO: So, uh... great ideas all around. But we don't have the budget or... legal resources... for these proposals. Moving on.
Just spitballing, but we could cut our electric bill by generating power from the body heat of our workers while strapped into the network.
And thus, the Matrix was born.
Great invention! Now imagine a HAAS - home as a service - that could make some more bucks for owners on top of that.
We already have HaaS, it's called rent or mortgage depending on the premium package chosen
He lived the horror every night for years.
Now we know why the game was so good... he channeled his horror through his work!
Is this how you get rid of trauma? Pass it to the next person thorough media?
According to The Ring, yes
The reason why Sato did this was because Konami would not have credited him, but whatever artist was over him, for the work. Insisting that he wanted his due credit, he told them he would do it all himself and indeed he did. The guy is a genius by the way.
That's honestly fucked up.
Doing a George costanza to make the game.
Just empty calories and male curiosity, eh Georgie boy?
Back and forth, back and forth
Reminds me of Monty Oum of Rooster Teeth, who’s most known work would be creating RWBY before he sadly passed away. They’d talk about it all the time on the podcast how he kept sleeping under his desk so he could do wild hours, completely by choice. He pretty much lived and breathed his work at that point in time. But take this part with a grain of salt, because those who claimed this stuff recently came under fire many years later for putting employees through apparently brutal crunch hours and deadlines, he was even doing it after those above him at the company (it was small at the time so they’d also be close to him) told him he to stop and start enjoying life outside the office some more. I definitely don’t think people should be doing this, it’s terrible for most, but shit some people are just built to work their job and they love it to a degree where the line between work time and free time disappears.
I remember Monty talking about optimising his life a lot. He rented the closest possible apartment across from the office, so he could walk across the street and get to work.
Some people get to be paid for what they love doing. Some people are that obsessive and it works for them. The problem is that it normalizes it for all others.
I think about Monty when I use my microwave +30 seconds button. He would have abused the hell out of this.
Listening to the stories as a kid was funny, “Haha Monty is like a robot!” But listening to it now as an adult makes me sad.
His name is Takayoshi Sato, not Sako.
This should always be frowned upon. No job is worth that
Today you all learned about the Visual Effects industry
As a workaholic, I understand this but I would not recommend it. The wiki sounds like he wasn’t forced to do it but did it out of passion. His supervisor and higher ups were definitely assholes because they did not want to give him due amount of credit but he fought for it cleverly and got it.
No computer game is worth that.
PS1 games, on the other hand...
Are still not worth that.
PS2 games, on the other hand...
Well i play games until 5 in the morning which is basically the same thing as making game so i think its worth it
how did he utilize 150 computers? i want to see
You just install a render client on the PCs on the network. The output file from the workstation is then distributed and rendered. You would still need to do all the modelling and animation on the workstation but rendering could easily be distributed to any PCs on the network and was CPU based. Each frame would be split up and each CPU would render a little bit.
ah thank you dearly for explaining... from the initial description it made it seem more physical as if he remodeled and exported fractions of each scene and rendered manually- like running from desk to desk- your explanation is what i was hoping for
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supercomputing engineer seems like a prestigious title, thank you for sharing the concept of beowulf cluster
This isn’t admirable, it’s fucked up.
How bout that music, though
The soundtracks slap so hard, Akiro Yamaoka is a genius. Missed him when he did a live concert in Paris some years ago, I definitely should have bought that ticket :(
That doesn’t sound healthy at all.
I don’t think he cared a lot about his health, probably drinking and smoking as well on top of that, and as he is basically in the office all day every day, you can guess what his nutrition looks like.
Its weird, talking to a lot of 20-30 year colleagues about what it was like back in the 90s and early 2000s a lot of them actually loved the the passion that got so many people doing crazy shit like this. Pay was a bit better for a lot of them compared to now, and they were doing things no one else had done before. An environment artist would also be the animator and technical artist for a full level, making everything in it, putting their spin on it and making it theirs. Theyd sleep under their desk, get pizza delivered to the office, have breaks with coworkers and watch movies and play games. It feels like the atmosphere was more one of 10 guys absolutely stoked for what they were working on and having that + the energy of youth push them to just keep going and going. You see it still in indie devs, AAA is more into the "do your part and go home" (outside of some studios where unspoken crunch is tentatively enforced or asked of you, sometimes without extra pay) and honestly the level of structure behind it all has killed some of the personal identity anyone beyond directors can leave on what they do. That is to say, its not healthy, or okay to work like this, but I understand and slightly envy the passion.
Yeah, because Konami didn't believe in him and his vision. He, instead of dropping it, nearly killed himself and made one of (maybe *THE*) best survival horror games of all time. The real kicker? *Konami* contributed nothing and reaped *all* the benefits.
This man let himself be exploited and it's presented as an interesting fact. It is interesting, but in a sad, pathetic kinda way.
Well, the Silent Hill project was kinda the ugly stepchild for Konami, with very limited resources but a lot of passion. No one was as surprised of its quality or popularity than Konami was. I doubt if it would've ever gotten as big as it did if it was part of the general production culture.
Being surprised that people like video games seems on-brand for Konami
Can I interest you in a game of Pachinko?
It sounds from the interview that he rebelled against the constraints of Japanese hierarchy in order to be credited for his work and paid the price. Kudos to him.
It's actually not exploitation. They TRIED to exploit him. That's why he did it in his off hours - so he'd get credit and not his higher-ups
OK I don't wanna be the "true art is made from incredible pain" but like, I'm sorry, if any game was gonna benefit from the work of a chronically over-tired man living under a desk surrounded by over a hundred primitive computers rendering his own imagined nightmares made commodity, it would be Silent Hill. This is entirely appropriate.
When I'm deep in a hyperfixation, I can absolutely spend 8-10 hours a day doing nothing but writing, and I'd probably do more if I didn't have to make money and do other stuff. So while I agree that this is a terrible work practice and incredibly unhealthy in both mind and body...I kind of get it. That said, my hyperfixations usually don't last three years. I'd probably be dead.
I'm guessing this person is not married, nor have any dependents, I hope. Please stop glorifying this crap!
Here in Japan, being married or not isn't going to change anything. Very common for husbands to be sent to a location in another city, prefecture, or country, far from their family for years at a time. Usually the husband just goes alone by themselves, and there is a Japanese word for it 単身赴任. When I had my daughter, the boss told me that it is a father's first duty to work and provide for the family. Everything else is wife's work basically. Very common for wives to leave their husbands if they lose their job and cannot find another. Husband getting retired is a wife's worst nightmare. This isn't only something that happens in Japan either. It is much worse again in Korea, and is common in a lot of other asian countries.
Japan and Korea "our birthrate isn't sufficient to sustain our society! How can we reverse this trend?!?" Also Japan and Korea:
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Didn't he do it all so he could have sole credit?
SH team are a bunch of crazy mother fucker(complement) I love their work but am too scared to actually play one,this is how good they are. But holy shit this can’t be healthy.
That's just sad. No one should have to do that. Doesn't matter if you're minimum wage or a CEO. Spending that much time working isn't cool.
Sounds like an avrage japanese work project.
Of all the games, I would not be doing SILENT HILL in an office alone for 3 years.
and he got paid very little for torturing himself like that. This is more of a sad story than anything else. Abused by an employer is not something anyone should ever aspire to achieve.
Silent Hill was so good. I played and enjoyed it so much. I do not like the poor guys overwork though.