The Kidnapping of a Tokyo Game Developer

Kenji Eno is a person you can wiki if you want, but The Kidnapping of a Tokyo Game Developer’s not that interested either. Like many a rock biopic, the band and biographies are beside the point, we’re here to rock: “Okay, here’s what I’m leading up to. We don’t understand you. We never will. Just give us the code for Spy Lunch.” Swap in whichever songs you like, the four on the floor blow by blow of Eno’s career handwaves the artistry to center the frontman, an anticensorship rockstar ready to headline any publicity stunt: “Anyway, everyone knows this story by now. Kenji Eno does whatever the ★★★★ he wants. You swapped the publisher’s discs to avoid censorship like it was a walk in the park.” The label absolutely can’t handle him, but how could they ever let him go? “When the company board freaked out over what you did on stage … one of their executives just said … Musicians are like that. Kenji Eno is just what we need in the video game industry.” But Eno will never sell out, even if his albums do, like any good rockstar he’s equal parts authentic and selfdestructive: “So if some company ★★★★★★ you off, just renege on every aspect of the relationship that you’ve built up. Burn the bridges. Swap the logos. You see, this is why my company is so ★★★★★★ afraid of you.” Party up this blaze of glory, then, til when the sweat is seventy proof and you’re staggering sweatsoaked into fevercold sheets for the worst hangover of your life we can spiral out to the expected ending of nothing else left: “No. By D2, I had given up. If the publisher was going to censor it, they were going to censor it. When I look back at it, I can still feel the thick atmosphere of it all. Not just the game, but my own state of mind. I had such a difficult time coming up with anything but the opening chapter. I wasn’t fully there. It’s like when a band makes their last album before breaking up.” You had to be there nostalgia with all its absences implied.

To the extent anticensorial cool could coalesce some crystallizable thesis, the chaos throws us back to the clash. The two most summatory lines largely contradict: on one hand, Eno’s need to contravene imposed limits generates his creativity’s laterality, “You weren’t just avoiding censorship. I think you needed those limitations as an opposing force to evoke your creativity. Like a game of cat and mouse.” but on the other hand, censorship is incapable of moderating true transmission, “But you know what? I know censorship. It makes no ★★★★★★★ difference. Because even when everything’s ★★★★★★★ missing, even when everything is ★★★★ on by the censors and ★★★★★★ over by control-freak publishers — sometimes people will know exactly what the ★★★★ you mean.” The need to slip censorship through improvised release valves ventures the auteur’s inexpressible appeal, yet simultaneously this chase leads nowhere to leave us speaking as clearly as hidden. Is there some synthesis to achieve, perhaps censorship only supercharges the subervision jouissance? Maybe, but The Kidnapping of a Tokyo Game Developer conceives of censorship primarily as an interloping inconvenience: “There were a ton of annoying rules around blood and violence at the time. So I tried to avoid them. I thought of myself as a spaceman. I was on Planet A and my audience was on Planet C … There were annoying laws on Planet B … but if I was a spaceman, I could just warp through it.” So we don’t get any further than commercialist rules are annoying, we just want a copy when the directors cut out.

Rebel to say what for what reason? The game shrugs; Spy Lunch, the MacGuffin lost masterwork, is a blank slate that, in a climactic twist, stays blank. Turns out that nobody cares what the lyrics say so long as they can singalong, so it’s worth mentioning that The Kidnapping of a Tokyo Game Developer zanies up a few archbrow zingers: “Your handiwork in tying down such a gentle giant could be compared to Gulliver’s Travels. Kenji Eno doesn’t make the comparison because his mouth is duct taped. You don’t make the comparison because you’re not here for literary allusions.” The central censorship complaint is generously sidetracked by escapades into the wacky, with the primary game element being failing to keep an eye on an elusive turtle, introduced as a joke and culminating in an impactful punchline. Occasionally your wandering eeries into the psychedelically silly: “Your supple, Italian middle-aged body fat is coated with years of grease from maintenance work, allowing you to slide down the toilet drain with ease. / You told Marco you could do this. You could have entered and exited the building via the pipes all along. There was no reason to brave the horrors of the glass elevator, the gaping maw of the urban skyline, the terrible heights.” Rather than feel at odds, the oddness gives a goodnatured wiliness to the proceedings that, in its inventive interplay, supplies us with a feelgood chorus better than getting anywhere: “And despite all the heady thematic interpretations that have been circulated during the forced discussion, Marco thinks that’s all that Kenji Eno wanted. To surprise people and be surprised himself.”

This game is well-written, engaging in its action, and has nice twists and a strong story format.

This is a choice-based game with some use of graphics (noticeably, a turtle) and animation and a lot of styling like darkening screens and so on.

You play as Lorenzo, who, with your brother Marco, have been sent by a video game company to kidnap Kenji Eno (a developer who lived in real life) and force him to let your company sell his unreleased magnum opus.

Your brother does most of the hard work, duct taping Kenji and interrogating him. Your main leverage over him is his pet turtle, which you have to watch over. Unfortunately it keeps escaping over and over again.

And that's the cycle that play settles into. You find the turtle in increasingly bizarre situations that require more and more elaborate responses, return to hear your brother narrate some exposition about Kenji's background and the games he developed, one at a time, with cover images.

All to lead up to one major joke, which I didn't see coming even though the game doled out numerous hints. My slow realization that the company in question is (Spoiler - click to show)Nintendo. My laugh at this funny text, thinking 'that's just like (Spoiler - click to show)Mario!': (Spoiler - click to show)Your supple, Italian middle-aged body fat is coated with years of grease from maintenance work, allowing you to slide down the toilet drain with ease. The final realization that (Spoiler - click to show)You are Italian brothers with M and L names that work for Nintendo and have to fight against a turtle while you also slip through sewer pipes. That was pretty great.

The Kenji Eno stuff is very earnest and lionizes him. I found myself feeling skeptical at this. He was a real man, just a person. My dad ran a video game company called Saffire in the 90's and 2000's and ended up meeting a lot of leading industry people and celebrities. He would tell stories about the wild and often terrible things they did and regrets they had; it was a very misogynistic and exploitative culture. Kenji Eno was an outsider and so maybe he wasn't like that, I thought, but this game is kind of like constructing a parasocial identity for Kenji, imagining his existence entirely based on what his games are like.

Then it hit me like a brick: PB Parjeter is to me what Kenji Eno is to Marco. Do I really know PB Parjeter? Does he know me? If I told my son a story about PB Parjeter, I would say 'one of my internet friends did this...'. I would call him that because I've played many of his games, reviewed them, and participated in several internet forum posts with him and communicated with him in my capacity as event organizer for a few events. If I search my email inbox (I never delete emails), the name Parjeter happens 32 times. But almost everything I know about him is through games. I remember the first game of his I played, Doctor Sourpuss, where I thought he might be furkle under a pseudonym. From his games I assume he likes vintage and/or surreal media, is introspective and philosophical, Francophone, and would be excited to hear about a Cannes film that was 8 hours of unedited trailcam footage (I mean this in a positive way). I would think him a good person overall. And what do I share of myself online? I deliberately avoid forming close friendships with people in the IF world (in the form of DMs, messages, etc.) because I like to use the IF world for escapism and not have it integrated into my reality. So I present a front of myself, and Parjeter presents a front of himself. So, that's what this game makes me think of. Is the Kenji Eno in the game anything at all like the real one was? Why does it matter, if the Brian Rushton you all imagine while reading this isn't really like the real one I am, and the small cluster of people I just pictured when I wrote that don't really exist or map to real individuals in real life?

A fun game, and a lot to think about.