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.”