Mr. Sionic, let’s start with your background. Did you study a technical field such as computer engineering, or a humanities field such as literature, art, or business?
I have been using PCs since I was five years old. In the 1980s, the most popular PC in Japan was made by NEC, and what I learned at the keyboard has been the foundation of my life.
I graduated from Aoyama Gakuin University’s Faculty of Letters, Department of Education. Today the university is famous for its Ekiden (long-distance relay marathon).
I enrolled intending to become a Japanese literature teacher. But after working with UNIX on the university computer system — especially learning how the World Wide Web worked — I came to see the Internet as an effective tool for education in Japan, and that became the theme of my research.
The term “e-Learning” is common today, but even before that — over a slow 14,400 bps connection! — the Internet was already being used for distance education, with experiments in delivering audio and video.
When you graduated, were you aiming for a career in the game industry?
When I graduated, young Japanese people were collectively called the “Ice-Age Generation,” and getting a job at an ordinary company was difficult. In Japan it is customary to graduate exactly four years after entering university — apart from those who continue on to graduate school — and then everyone uniformly aims to find employment at a company.
That custom collapsed during the Ice-Age era, though; for several years, society as a whole hired far fewer young people.
I wanted to work in the game industry — Sega and Namco especially interested me — but in that climate, I felt it would be an inefficient waste of my youth to go around bowing to companies begging to be hired. So I quit job hunting. Later, when a friend told me a startup in the knowledge-management field was being established, I joined immediately.
What kind of work did you do before founding High Five? Were you involved with other online games before Bright Kingdom — which from here on I’ll call “Burakin”?
When I joined a startup after graduating, Java had just become available on Japanese cell phones — not smartphones, but feature phones with a 10-key keypad — so I designed an app that talked to a server: the phone would send a voice message asking, “Do you know any good restaurants in this neighborhood?” and the application would consult a server-side database and reply with the restaurant’s name, contact info, and a map.
By keeping databases across several genres, users could draw on the knowledge of many experts through a single app interface.
That concept — commonplace today with Siri and GPT — was conceived in 2000. However, it wasn’t a business model that could pay for the processor power, database licenses, and data-center charges of the time.
Later, a Korean groupware developer looking to expand into Japan came to us for advice — that became the trigger for our work localizing web solutions aimed at Korean business users into the Japanese market.
This is how we got into the business of publishing Korean MMORPGs in Japan.
Before Bright Kingdom, we published “Seal Online,” and my history as a GameMaster named “Sionic” began with Seal.
We have seen that image you use as your Twitter profile picture many times. Is there a story behind this avatar? It’s supposed to be a representation of you, right, Mr. Sionic?
Yes — I’ve been using the same profile picture for 20 years. My wife drew it (she was still my girlfriend back then, since this was before we married).
“Sionic” is a play on my real name, “Shion,” which I used as my GameMaster name for Seal Online. It’s also a parody of Sega’s “Sonic the Hedgehog.”
In Japanese, it would be pronounced “Shi-o-ni-kku,” but players read it as “Shi-o-Ni-ku” — “shio” sounds like the word for “salt,” and “niku” like “meat.”
Since Seal Online had both Salt and Meat items, players affectionately called me “Shio-niku” — salt meat. And the profile picture depicts exactly that: me in the form I take when playing the GM character.
What do you do these days? Are you still part of the game industry, or have you moved on to a different sector?
I run a smartphone-game development and operations company called Amatz Inc. It’s a small studio that plans, develops, and runs visual-novel games for women, but I’ve now handed day-to-day management over to my co-owner.
So what am I doing? These days my main focus is public administration.
I have a habit of diving into unfamiliar fields that interest me — you may be surprised to hear that I ran in the 2020 Tokyo gubernatorial election.
Although I lost, I was invited into the local government of Kanagawa Prefecture, just south of Tokyo, and I serve as an advisor on digital administration.
I’m also a writer. I published a novel about a blockchain game in 2019, and I’ve been writing about a book a year alongside my other projects. Since 2021, I’ve also been serializing a series of novels set in future Tokyo in DIME magazine, a well-known publisher.
As for why I double as a writer: successive governors of Tokyo have tended to be writers or TV personalities.
In other words, for a long time Tokyo and its residents have wanted a celebrity who can convey a lot of knowledge in an easy-to-understand written form — not someone strong in politics or military economics.
I also keep writing because I want to be well prepared to run in another gubernatorial election someday.
Now we’d like to ask about High Five Entertainment, the company you founded and directed. What motivated you to create it, and what expectations did you have at the time?
In December 2005, after leaving my position as the publisher of Seal Online, I was invited to join the next MMORPG project — the Japanese version of Shine Online.
Shine Online was being prepared for release by the web-services division of a publicly traded company — I won’t reveal its name — before High5 came along.
However, that company told the team the project was cancelled, saying it might or might not prove profitable.
We were in the middle of signing the Japanese publishing deal for Shine Online with OnsOn — then called Aragon — so the other team members and I were at a loss. We decided to find a new investor and form a new company; we found a venture capitalist who put up substantial funding, and High5 was born.
Was Burakin the main reason behind High Five’s creation, or did it simply happen to become its first and most famous game?
Yes, that’s right — High5 was created first and foremost to publish Burakin. But beyond that, the plan was to expand the number of MMORPG titles we published, and eventually to release titles developed in-house.
Besides Burakin, what other games did the company publish or develop?
There were also “Tendou” by Korea’s Lizard Corp., “Allias Story,” which we developed through a subsidiary in China, casual tennis games, and “AD Quest” (Korea’s Forgotten Online), which adopted an advertising model that was rare at the time. We also subcontracted the operation of “Stragarden,” a Japanese-made game.
How many staff members did High Five have when Burakin launched, and how was the team structured? In other words, how many Game Masters, programmers, artists, and so on?
I don’t remember the exact figures, but I believe Burakin was run by roughly the following, or more:
| Role | Count |
|---|---|
| Producer | Me |
| Director | 1 |
| Planners & localizers | 4 |
| Artists | 2 |
| Game Masters | 6 |
| Server engineers | 5 |
| Web designers | 2 |
| Marketing | 3 |
On top of that were the full-time executives and administrative staff.
We understand OnsOn Soft, the developer of Shine Online, was a Korean company. How was the first contact with them made?
Starting around 2000, a wave of Korean companies wanted to enter the MMORPG market in Japan. As a result, experienced MMORPG operators were receiving publishing offers and materials on new games on a daily basis.
To strengthen the business, High5’s board included members with strong connections to Korean game companies, so our business with OnsOn also began as one of the many games that were introduced to us.
As for communicating with Korean companies: when I managed Seal Online, its developer, Grigon, was also a Korean company — and before that, my job had been localizing Korean web services. So it wasn’t difficult to find staff who spoke both Japanese and Korean.
I personally took Korean lessons, and as you can see in the article below, I could perform business greetings with clean pronunciation. I can hardly speak it now, though.
https://www.4gamer.net/games/019/G001925/20060323223908/
How did you communicate with OnsOn despite the language barrier?
As I mentioned earlier, there were four planners and localizers, including a Korean member who could speak Japanese.
These days, worldwide communication is instantaneous and trivial thanks to smartphones and messaging apps like LINE, but that wasn’t the case back then — smartphones didn’t even exist (LOL). How did you maintain contact with OnsOn?
There was no Zoom back then, so we relied mainly on MSN Messenger, and for calls we used Polycom — a voice-only conference-call system.
I also traveled to Seoul for meetings.
To my regret, negotiation sometimes forced me to use strong words I had just learned and hadn’t wanted to resort to.
Thanks to photos that still survive online, we know you met the OnsOn staff (photo attached below). How often did you meet them in person?
This is a nostalgic photo — possibly from my very first visit to OnsOn. The jacket I’m wearing was borrowed from one of the other executives: I normally work in casual clothes, so I’d gone to Korea without a suit.
I made the trip once every few months, rotating with the other executives. The visits were mostly for business talks, but I always brought my planning and localization staff along to discuss development and art.
I’ve always enjoyed talking about game systems and art more than about business.
Under what conditions was Burakin licensed to High Five? We’d like to know how often the license had to be renewed, and what revenue model was set up between High Five and OnsOn regarding royalties.
I can’t disclose the details of individual contracts, but let me explain how a typical Korean MMORPG of that era (2000 onward) was licensed for the Japanese market.
A contract fee is paid to obtain exclusive rights to distribute the game in Japan. Since no revenue is generated during the closed-beta and open-beta preparation period, the developer has no choice but to get by on that contract fee. These amounts made the news in Korea — for the MMORPG genre, the going rate was around $1 million (about ¥100 million at the time).
Once commercial service begins in Japan, most contracts call for a percentage of what remains after credit-card settlement fees and similar costs are subtracted from monthly sales to be paid to the developer.
In some cases, part of the upfront fee is treated as a minimum guarantee once the game goes commercial, and monthly remittances from Japan to Korea only begin once sales reach a certain level.
OnsOn’s contracts followed the same general pattern, though I won’t go into detail about them.
Moving on to the game itself — did High Five have full creative freedom over Burakin’s design, or were you bound by strict guidelines dictated by OnsOn?
They gave High5 free rein when it came to the art we developed in Japan. We could create our own costumes and items without restrictions; if they suited the user culture, OnsOn would adopt them for the Korean version, and if other countries requested them, OnsOn would mediate so that their publishers could use them.
Did OnsOn let you and High Five’s developers use their software tools to modify the game files, or was every change done strictly by OnsOn?
OnsOn gave High5 template files and the Korean version’s files. Based on those, we would prepare the modified data ourselves and send it to OnsOn for implementation.
The reason was that if our Japanese staff used their tools directly to change the code, it would have created version-control problems.
Version control was handled solely by OnsOn — that was the best arrangement.
What was your philosophy for making Burakin different from the other MMORPGs of the time?
We always tried to incorporate things that no other MMORPG had done before. That was because High5 was a new company — we knew we couldn’t compete head-on with companies backed by strong capital.
Instead, we wanted to stay nimble and take measures that larger companies couldn’t adopt, whether due to reputational risk or compliance concerns.
We recently learned that Burakin had voiced NPC lines — that surprised us, since no other version of the game had that feature. Was it your decision to implement them?
Yes, that was our doing. We hired Aoni Production, a well-known Japanese agency specializing in voice actors. The reason for adding Japanese voices was very simple: I thought it strange that PlayStation and Xbox games used voices, yet PC MMORPGs didn’t.
And being an otaku, I knew voice acting was booming in the world of Japanese animation, so I felt we should hire the professionals. My personal favorite is the village chief’s voice.
When the Fiesta expansion came to Burakin, a custom OST was produced for the game, but it was never released or used by the other versions of Fiesta. Was that due to copyright, or simply a design decision by OnsOn and the other publishers?
We created our own background music for Bright Kingdom as a form of localization. What surprised me during the open beta was that the field music — Lumen’s aside — was selected at random. There should be coastal music for the beach and forest music for the forest. And since game music matters just as much as the graphics — whether it’s a sense of adventure or of dread, depending on the scene — we composed entirely new background music.
No rights issues have ever arisen over the OST; it was produced with OnsOn’s full permission. Why other Fiesta versions never got their own OSTs, I don’t know — perhaps their publishers simply weren’t interested in the audio side.
Because I was familiar with the rights problems in the music industry, I split the original CD into two discs, “Side-K” and “Side-J” — K for Korea, J for Japan. K holds the Shine Online music composed in Korea, including tracks that were only implemented during the beta. J holds the music we composed in Japan.
By keeping K and J on separate discs, we ensured that if a rights dispute arose between Japan and Korea, each country could still sell the disc covering its own music.
As it turned out, we needn’t have worried — we were on such good terms.
Following up on that — the new tracks appear to be credited to “NKS Project” but published by “Super Sweep.” Could you confirm that?
Yes. The “S” in NKS Project stands for “Sawa” — the first letter of the producer’s family name. The “N” was, I believe, Mr. Nakagawa, and the “K” I can’t remember right now...
Super Sweep is a trusted dealer in game OST CDs, with a proven track record in Japan — so that’s the company we approached.
While we’re on the subject of names — did you have a hand in renaming Shine Online to Fiesta, or was that OnsOn’s decision alone?
For High5’s version I personally chose “Bright Kingdom,” because reading “Shine” the Japanese way gives “shi-ne” — “you must die.”
There were several other candidates, but I picked this one with the Japanese culture of abbreviated nicknames in mind: as “Dragon Quest” becomes “DraQue,” “Bright Kingdom” naturally shortens to “Burakin.” I’m glad players came to love that name exactly as I’d envisioned.
As for “Fiesta,” that was OnsOn’s decision. But since players loved “Burakin,” we decided to market the update as “Bright Kingdom ver. Fiesta,” presenting it as one of the game’s seasons.
We kept the main name and hung “Fiesta” behind it as an identifying mark, just as “Windows XP” and “Windows Vista” did in those days.
As with the music, there were costumes and hairstyles for the player characters (photo attached below) that were never released outside Burakin. They don’t appear to be tied to any external brand — was there a reason these assets remained exclusive to Japan even after Burakin closed?
The data for costumes and hairstyles made in Japan was consolidated at OnsOn, so publishers in other countries could use them if they wished. If they were never used elsewhere, it simply means those publishers didn’t care much for them.
Were you in contact with the other Fiesta publishers, such as Outspark in the USA, or was your involvement with the game limited to OnsOn?
I only ever dealt with OnsOn. I knew that you couldn’t simply borrow know-how from Outspark’s methods of operation in the U.S. — different countries have different cultures and business practices.
Did you have a favorite character class, map, or music track in Burakin? And would you happen to have a screenshot of your in-game character?
Fighter. In any RPG I play, I gravitate toward two-handed axes. That said, I think costumes looked best on the female Archer — when our designers created costumes for Japan, they often drew cute designs that would suit the Archer.
My favorite map is the Kingdom Quest map “King Boyon.” Because so many players took part, the atmosphere was the best.
As for music, I like everything composed in Japan (all on Side-J), but especially the Fiesta title theme, “Fiesta Opening Part I.” I chose to write it as a rondeau because it suggests a world whose tragic history repeats itself endlessly.
As for screenshots, I’ll look for them — which means first finding an old hard drive at the back of my closet and plugging it in.
These days, Big Data and data-science techniques make analyzing player data very easy. How did you analyze player data and feedback back then?
We certainly didn’t have modern analytical tools, and the process of fine-tuning the game with reference to such data wasn’t very sophisticated.
We could obtain statistics on players’ level ranges and on which equipment was popular, so we did look at those.
But our main focus was on feedback received by email, and on sending Game Masters into the game to see how players were actually playing.
The principle that customer support comes first and data analysis second is something I still emphasize in my work outside games today.
How many concurrent players did Burakin have on a normal day? Did the numbers differ on holidays and weekends?
Honestly, I don’t remember this well. I think there were about 3,000 people online at most times of day. Events were held mostly on holidays and weekends, but there were plenty held on weekday evenings too.
In the US, Fiesta ran multiple servers so a huge influx of players wouldn’t saturate a single world — if memory serves, there were five servers to choose from at login. Did High Five also run multiple servers for Burakin?
I don’t remember much about this either — I believe there were four sets: 1-1, 1-2, 2-1, 2-2. Four server sets, but we were running roughly 100 hardware units in a data center to support them.
I recall that in 2008 or 2009 High5 had to reduce the number of servers in the data center due to financial difficulties, and we wore our engineers out with database-consolidation work.
And I didn’t only handle the database side — I personally went to the data center, loaded the blade servers onto a dolly with several people, and hauled them out. It’s amazing to think that today we can manage instances cheaply in the cloud, without such a ridiculous number of machines. The technological progress of the past 15 years is remarkable.
What kind of modifications did you make to Burakin to accommodate Japanese players? I’m asking from the perspective of game balance — monster and quest experience, difficulty, player movement, and so on.
This is an area where we clashed with OnsOn often and made many adjustments.
MMORPGs generally reward party play, but the Japanese Burakin had a lot of solo players.
The game design was a big reason for that: party play should have offered real advantages, but as I remember, the advantages were few and paltry.
The balance was unexciting — as we put it, “soloing is hard, and party play isn’t tasty” (worth the effort).
I also had a hard time with PvP, which was added midway through the game’s life. A versus mode has to be designed in from the start; bolting PvP onto a game whose players value chatting and solo play was never something they’d appreciate. In the end, PvP never took root in the Japanese Burakin — it was only enjoyed when the Game Masters staged exhibition events to give players a sporting thrill.
I remember many clashes between OnsOn’s planners, who wanted the game played exactly as designed, and High5’s planners, who wanted the design optimized around how players actually played.
One of the most frequent requests was to make Kingdom Quest more appealing, since it could be enjoyed casually even as a raid.
How did you balance the free-to-play (F2P) aspect of the game? For reference, the US publisher of Fiesta was relentless about pay-to-win (P2W), handing paying players a huge advantage. In fact, weapon and armor enchanting was essentially locked behind a paywall — even at low levels, enchanting required Cash Shop items — leaving F2P players in the dust.
When Bright Kingdom went commercial, there was conflict among the staff over the weapons we put up for sale: some wanted a high price, arguing that selling strong items with a limited number of days of use would break the game balance, while others said it was better to price them low and let them be consumed again and again.
Back then, monthly-fee games were still the norm, and the term “game balance” was used in the sense of keeping players from leveling up as much as possible, so that updates wouldn’t run dry.
We ended up choosing the lower price, which worked fine up until the Fiesta version.
But with Fiesta, the “soloing is too hard and party play isn’t good” problem I mentioned earlier grew worse; the enchanting items on sale became less and less useful, until only long-term play paid off.
I think the game ended up uninteresting for both free players and paying players.
Which Cash Shop items did Japanese players seek most? In the USA, since every premium item gave a clear advantage, you could say everything was sought after (LOL).
Costumes were popular in Japan, so it was essential that our artists produced new designs every month.
We deliberated over how much numerical advantage to give them, but we steered clear of anything too flashy. If you give a costume a large advantage, previous buyers get angry about the cost of rebuying, and new buyers end up cut off from the community.
Moving on to the social side of Burakin: what was your marketing philosophy, and given that the game was free to download, did that put your marketing methods at a disadvantage?
At the time, free downloads were the norm in Japan’s PC and MMORPG sector, so this wasn’t a problem.
The real problem, though, was that — unlike modern smartphone apps — we lacked a complete set of tools for capturing marketing data.
For example, my first move with any service is to try to eliminate the “abandonment rate,” but without knowing how far players leveled up after installing and whether they kept logging in afterward, improvement is impossible.
Also, the only effective advertising channel back then was banner ads on information sites; there was nothing like today’s variety of methods. I gave direct input on the art and design of the banner ads, tuning them myself.
Several print media were created for Burakin, such as the manga in FANG COMICS and THE NETGAMES magazine. Were they meant to promote the game to new prospective players, or to keep the existing player base interested?
The FANG manga was aimed mostly at attracting new players. That’s why it uses only the stage setting: the story is unrelated to Bright Kingdom’s main scenario — it’s simply “such an adventurer might have existed.”
“Monthly Shonen Fang” was Leed’s — a publisher known mainly for hard-core adult manga — challenge to enter the boys’ manga magazine market. The magazine was slated to carry manga of many genres; themes boys would like, such as baseball and yokai, were picked up, and among them there was demand for a “game comic adaptation.”
That’s where Bright Kingdom, which needed to develop new customers, fit in.
THE NETGAMES was a magazine series with one volume per MMORPG title — rare in Japan at the time. It was created both to win new customers and to entertain existing players. That said, the bonus-item artwork Burakin offered wasn’t very appealing: the magazine’s short production period left no time to implement attractive items in the game itself.
A premium edition of Burakin was released as a CD (photo attached below). However, we have very little information about it — we’re not even sure who published it. Could you tell us more?
It’s a CD-ROM package released by a company called e-Frontier. The “ONLINE FRONTIER” logo in the upper right marks it as the online-gaming division of e-Frontier, and the “ARAGON” below it is OnsOn’s former company name.
In Japan at the time, many users had slow connections, so creating and selling an installation CD made sense.
However, since the installer was originally a free download, the package was designed so buyers wouldn’t feel they’d lost out on the price. As noted in the lower right of the package, it bundled in-game items and fan goods such as poster sheets to make the set worth the money.
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We recently discovered that two PLANEX products came with a free CD containing an installable version of Burakin — the BLW-HPMM-G router, which we’ve been unable to track down, and the GW-US54Mini-G. That’s a very unique and clever way to introduce new players to the game. How was the deal between High Five and PLANEX struck?
Receiving this question brought it all back to me.
PLANEX is a well-known maker and seller of network hardware. At the time, to increase the users of its hardware, it invested in online game companies and marketed its products so that gamers would choose PLANEX gear when playing online games.
PLANEX also invested in High5 — not a huge amount — and provided us with networking products for our office. They performed well, and we had no complaints.
As part of these efforts, we decided to bundle the installation CD, reasoning that anyone who bought a PLANEX product would have a good-quality connection and would therefore be able to play online games.
Generally speaking, did Burakin’s physical merchandise sales contribute to the game’s profits?
Yes, they did. We never considered that magazines, packages, or OSTs would produce direct profit on their own — we always thought of them as ways to promote playing Burakin, so that the game itself would ultimately profit.
We also had the magazine publishers, package makers, and CD sellers share the production costs, so that High5 bore as little of them as possible.
The design of the Burakin website is amazing, but only low-resolution screenshots survive. Did a single person handle both the graphic design and the programming, or was it multiple people? In either case, who developed the website?
Every part of the website was created by High5 members. Under my policy that “web design is engineering,” the web designers belonged to the same team as the engineers, while the artists who drew the characters worked within the planners’ team.
The site’s source code was lost along with the servers when the company became NETBANCO, so it’s difficult to recreate. And as for old screenshots — same answer as before: I’ll go digging through old hard drives.
Setting concept art aside, did you commission a single artist for Burakin’s posters and advertisements, or were several artists responsible?
In the early stages of the Japanese rollout, the production period was so short that we had no choice but to use Shine Online’s art. Later, several artists took part and produced a variety of ad designs, but they lacked a sense of unity — so in the later stages, two in-house artists handled the designs.
There are images of a card system similar to Yu-Gi-Oh! (photo attached below), but we have no idea of the context behind them. Was it just fan art by a player, or was this a real feature designed by High Five?
It’s a simple card-collection feature that could only be enjoyed on the website; High5 created it.
As a rule, game players want to play the game — not read a website.
But as the operator, we ran a shopping mall on the site selling items, so we had to give users something fun on the website and steer them toward it.
We considered several approaches and settled on a simple collection feature that let users gather as many card illustrations as possible.
Each card carried a text explaining Burakin’s world setting, helping players understand the world of the game.
I doubt I’d have remembered this without your question. Thank you...
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There are many public events you took part in, and three have caught our attention. The first is the so-called “Triple Play,” which appears to have been held around Burakin’s launch. Do you remember it?
Today, YouTubers do the same thing all over the world, but in 2006 I think I was the only person in Japan streaming game footage over Windows Media Server.
I started the “in-game fixed-point camera” to show people who hadn’t yet played that the fun of an MMORPG lies in the places where many players gather. And those who already played — seeing the screen full of players would make them want to log in themselves.
The live streaming showed me visibly enjoying the game, to communicate that Burakin had a stirring, emotion-charged kind of fun.
Everyone does this today, but back then I invented it to fulfill a single wish: I wanted to convey the fun.
The second was your collaboration with “Yasuda Dai Circus.” Can you tell us more? We’re especially interested because you wore the “naked tie” costume. We don’t know whether it was meant to be Burakin-exclusive, but it was actually ported and distributed in other versions of Fiesta.
It’s a promotional web video for Bright Kingdom starring the famous Japanese comedy troupe “Yasuda Dai Circus.”
Their signature gag: the central member — Boss Yasuda — has his clothes torn off, leaving him in a “naked tie” getup to draw laughs.
In the video, Boss Yasuda visits High5, and I greet him wearing a naked tie myself — a surreal gag.
After that, the boss and I hit it off, and the video has us introducing the game while playing Burakin together.
The naked-tie look requires no license, so if that costume was implemented in Fiesta in other countries and enjoyed worldwide, I’d be glad.
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The third of these is Comiket 70 and 72. It seems you ran a booth there and distributed a Bright Kingdom fan book (photo attached below) — we’ve tried to obtain a copy but haven’t found one yet. Could you tell us about your experience at Comiket and your interactions with the Burakin players?
Comiket is Japan’s biggest festival for people whose hobbies are manga, anime, and games. We decided to exhibit there, thinking it was a chance to raise Burakin’s profile.
It came together because I’d been going to Comiket since my Seal days and knew how it worked, and because High5’s in-house artists, as individual illustrators, understood it deeply. I even drew a simple comic in the fan book.
Do you know of any radio or TV programs that featured High Five or Burakin?
There’s one radio program linked to the manga magazine “Monthly Shonen Fang” mentioned earlier. It aired on Bunka Hoso, a Japanese radio station that broadcasts many programs strong in anime, games, and voice-acting culture.
The program was called “Weekly Shonen Fang” — the magazine was monthly, the radio show weekly. After a few broadcasts it was renewed, and I was invited to join.
Famous voice actors Katsuyuki Konishi and Wataru Hatano hosted, and my role was to give commentary on internet and PC culture to match each topic.
As the show was tied to the manga magazine, it ended around the same time the magazine ceased publication.
(The publisher’s push toward boys hadn’t worked out.)
As for TV, I don’t remember any program.
When High5’s contract for Burakin was finalized, we held a party to celebrate the company’s founding — an attempt to advertise Burakin by inviting the press. It aired for a few minutes on a local Tokyo TV station as part of its business news. The cost-performance was excellent.
Are you still in touch with staff from High Five and OnsOn?
We don’t actively stay in touch, but thanks to social networking sites, we can loosely follow what each other is doing. I’ve been moving forward with my new life at my new employer.
Looking back, how do you see Burakin and its impact on early online gaming in Japan?
I think we were innovative in our operational and marketing methods. Many other game companies saw how Burakin was being marketed and imitated us.
As for the game itself, I consider Bright Kingdom a very approachable MMORPG — ideal for the desire to play while primarily communicating with others.
Still, it was ultimately just a Japanese localization of Shine Online, and we judged it difficult to differentiate the game within the scope of localization alone.
OnsOn’s work deserves great credit, but a developer creates the game the developer dreams of, not the one the publisher dreams of. That’s a problem common to every localized game.
With all the experience you’ve accumulated since, is there anything you would have done differently in Burakin’s marketing or game balance?
Information from customer support is valuable but limited, so I would have introduced marketing tools to gather evidence and improve the in-game content players want.
On marketing: the in-game advertising system we worked on in the Japanese Burakin is now commonplace in smartphone apps, so I would have pushed that forward to raise the F2P user experience.
On game balance: I would have changed it so that solo play is fun, and party play makes it even more enjoyable.
As the former founder and director of a gaming company, what advice would you give to new people entering the gaming industry, to help them develop successful MMO games?
I’ve written a lot above, but the most important thing to keep in mind is whether the player is having fun. Both game systems and marketing theory should be “slaves to fun.”
As we approach the end of this interview, we have one more question. The song “Mi-Wa-Ku★Kingdom (Campaign Song)” is deeply interesting to us — a video of it still survives online (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tlYcc9WB0tM). If possible, we’d like to hear the story behind its creation and recording. Also, do you have a higher-quality version of the video?
The music video was shot around the time we produced the OST.
First, Mi-Wa-Ku★Kingdom was a track secretly created by N and K of NKS Project. I wasn’t told anything — I was suddenly asked to write lyrics, because they’d made a fun song.
I can write lyrics, so I dashed them off right away, but I never expected to sing it myself.
In the end, during the OST studio recording, they used the leftover time to record me singing.
Then a friend of mine who works as a TV scriptwriter heard it and loved it so much that he decided to make a music video with himself and his staff — we bought the HipHop outfits of the day in Harajuku, the young people’s district.
No higher-quality version of the video exists. In 2006–07, on the Japanese internet, even VGA (640×480) was called “high quality,” and editing the video at a larger pixel size simply wasn’t practical resource-wise.