17-Bit

A tight-knit group of expats living theindie-devdream in Japan

- Nathan Brown

Not many success stories start with a betrayal. Yet that’s precisely how 17-Bit began. Jake Kazdal was the art director at Zombie Studios, the Seattle-based developer on Blacklight: Tango Down. In his spare time, he’d been working on something – something that, eventually, would lay the foundations of a studio he’d been talking for years about setting up with one of his best friends. He’d taken the Zombie gig after leaving his job at EA in Los Angeles so he could be in Seattle, where the pair intended to set up shop. Then, the friend – if you can call him that – took a job at Ubisoft Montreal. “He up and left,” Kazdal tells us. “He just bailed. I was like, ‘Fuck it. I’m doing it myself’.”

Fast forward nine years and Kazdal has, indeed, done it. 17-Bit is now working on its fourth project, and has moved across the globe; while it retains a small, two-person team and an office in Seattle, the bulk of the studio is now based in Kyoto, Japan, in an unassuming twofloor house on a side street near the Imperial palace. The development team, comprised almost entirely of expats, shares an open-plan space on the upper floor; downstairs, one bedroom has been converted into a meeting room, while the others are left nearly empty for visitors to crash out in.

There’s a homely feel to the place, the small, tight-knit team of veterans surrounded by toys and trinkets from Kazdal’s lifelong love of games and enviable career. In the early 2000s he worked for Sega under Tetsuya Mizuguchi, as an artist on Space Channel 5 and Rez. He quit in 2003 and moved to Los Angeles, got an art degree, and joined EA, where he was part of the team that worked with Steven Spielberg on the neverreleased LMNO.