【Workplace】 Looking For A Job At A Game Company Was Thanks To A Friend (2010)

Title: 【Workplace】Looking For A Job At A Game Company Was Thanks To A Friend / 「【仕事場】ゲーム会社を受けたのは友人のおかげ」
Source: ZakZak (down)

In 2010, around the release of Takumi Shū's game Ghost Trick, ZakZak featured several columns by Takumi Shū their series The Workplace Of Top Creators, where creators got a place to talk about how their jobs and how they got them. In this first column originally posted on June 11, 2010, Takumi explains how he got hired by Capcom in the first place. His friend mentioned in this column (Tanaka Shuntarō), originally worked in Sega CS2 and later moved to Overworks, and has directed games like Skies of Arcadia and Valkyria Chronicles.

Ghost Trick Director Takumi Shū – Part 1: How I Got Hired

I am Takumi Shū, director of Gyakuten Saiban (Ace Attorney) and my latest game, Ghost Trick. Let me tell you about my student days in this first part.

When I was young, I was a quiet boy who loved books. Mostly mystery fiction. I read all the books of Edogawa Rampo and Arsène Lupin published by Poplar Publishing. But when I was in elementary school, I wanted to become someone like Fujiko Fujio (laugh). I looked up to that baret… So in middle school, I drew in the art club, and I turned my attention to the guitar in high school. I only wanted to play acoustic guitar actually, but I joined something like a classical guitar club, where we’d play Bach…. And in university, I joined the magic club. It all might look a bit random, but my youth consisted of mystery, music and magic.

I wanted to find a job that had something to do with mystery fiction, so I mainly tried with publishers, but I got rejected by them one after another. It was around that time that a college friend of mine, Tanka Shuntarō who is nowadays a game director at Sega, was working on a proposal for a game, which he needed for his job hunting activities. He appeared to have a lot of fun with it, so I thought I might wanna give it a try too. That is how I got my job. It was Shuntarō who recommended Capcom to me. Even though he himself went to Sega (laugh). If it wasn’t for Shuntarō, I wouldn’t be here today.

So I kinda rolled into the game industry, but now I think about it, games contain everything I loved during my student years: text, visuals and music. Back then, I was even cocky to believe that now I could really show everyone what I was made of. It turned out it wasn’t as easy as I had believed. I will continue my story next week.