The interview with Yoko Taro in the special feature this week covers four pages worth of interesting details about his past and much more! There’s a TON here, so I don’t think I will be translating it word for word but will be making notes about all the interesting things that I come across.
This post will be edited the further I progress into this section (I’ve only read half of it yet), so please expect the info on here to change over time. I’m also getting pretty exhausted right now, so the phrasing here might be rather lackluster. I’ll try to fix this up over the next couple of days. xP
Here we go!
- First gaming experience was with the Cassette Vision in 1981. The game that impressed him the most was “Gradius” and it was this game that eventually got him interested in entering the gaming industry.
- Both his mother and father worked, so his grandmother took care of him most of the time. He felt like he was mostly raised by his grandmother. She gave him considerable freedom as long as he studied, so he often could have whatever food he wanted, etc. and his grandmother would do it for him. He got a little chubby around this time in junior high where his grandfather was the principal at his school. He knew his grandmother loved him very much but says that she had the “soul of a demon” and referred to her as a “Spartan”. Apparently, she would tell other teachers in the school to favor her grandkid. She was also extremely overprotective of him, and he thinks that this lead way to the collapse of his personality. (His real-life grandmother sounds a lot like Kali, Kaine’s grandmother…)
- In junior and senior high school, he didn’t exercise and a strange feeling aimed against those who are good at sports: “Stupid offline ppl!” His grandmother stopped checking to see if he was doing his homework since he entered junior high and so he never did it or studied. His grades plummeted. He even thought that he was becoming a real idiot and still he loved games and anime–they were fun. So, this is how he passed every day in folly.
- His parents wanted him to join the kendo club at school but he was more interested in the ping pong club that was next door, so he eventually switched clubs. He never aimed to enter the national tournaments, so he merely had fun.
- In high school, he joined the manga club but was sucked into the art club. He grew to hate the authority of “art”. With a spirit of malice, he thought things like “at some point you guys will be replaced by games and new media.” This is around the point where his flame of hatred is ignited. “The people around me who chastised me like that are bad, aren’t they?”
- Ever since he graduated from high school, he lost contact with his old friends. He called out three of his friends to contact him at his twitter: Mutou and Ichikawa from Ogidai JH, and Teshima from HS.
- His father is a cook and owns a small restaurant that has unique set meals every day. He never had anything negative to say about Yoko going into the gaming industry, even though it’s very distant from his own profession.
- Yoko has a younger sister.
- He was in the “science” path in high school even though his grades weren’t very good and he knew he wouldn’t be able to go to a science focused college. Since he liked to draw, he thought to aim for an art school and from the summer of his third year in high school he went to an art cram school. Just, he never told his teacher that he wanted to enter the gaming industry since he was embarrassed by it.
- He wasn’t very good in English, so he looked for a school that didn’t require English, and he decided on Kobe Design University. He also chose this school because they offered a course in CG art, which was a pretty niche course given the technology at the time. He learned some computer programming, video editing, and a bunch of other related things– it was a fun time.
- He didn’t really play many games during college, though. He has very few memories of the Super Nintendo because of this.
- He met many of his current friends and business partners at this school in Kobe. Iwasaki Takuya (ILCA) is the same age as Yoko but was one year below him. Okabe Keiichi (MONACA) is one year older than Yoko but because he was learning to be a hair stylist before, he was in the same school year with Iwasaki. Yasui Akira (director of DOD2) was in Yoko’s same graduating class.
- Yoko went to study in the UK for a year, so his graduation was thusly delayed a year. He had just been dumped by a girl and felt like he couldn’t bear to be in Japan. It was during that time that he saw a recruiting notice about a study abroad program. After he decided on the study abroad program, he still had about a half a year before leaving, and in that time he was again dumped by a girl. He throughly felt like there was nothing left for him in Japan. He thinks even to this day that should he have been even the slightest bit more popular among the girls or if he had more fun in life, he might not have ever entered the gaming industry. He felt some strange darkness pushing him toward the world of making things.
