ICHIGOICHIE

Getting back into the groove of making music games, and staying the course

- BY ALAN WEN

The Japanese expression that inspired Ichigoichie's name can be roughly translated as 'once in a lifetime'. It would be an apt description for how David Ventura got his foot in the door in the Japanese videogame industry. After a summer college internship in Kyoto where he used robotics to teach children music, he had his heart set on working in Japan full-time. "I had a really hard time because I didn't speak any Japanese and I didn't have any titles shipped, so companies like Sony kept telling me to go back to the States, ship some titles, learn the language and try again," he recalls. Through persistence and at his own expense, however, he eventually managed to land interviews by networking with two studios, FromSoftware (during its Armored Core days) and iNiS Corporation, the latter of which had achieved acclaim for Gitaroo Man. It was at iNiS where everything clicked. "They offered me a job on the spot, so I took it and cancelled my FromSoftware interview. I got lucky."

Having spent over a decade at iNiS, starting with the Ouendan and Elite Beat Agents games on DS and later more mainstream fare partnering with Microsoft on karaoke series Lips, Ventura's Japanese has vastly improved. And despite now being based in Stockholm, Sweden, his own studio's name (also going by 151A, homonymous to the Japanese pronunciation) suggests a desire to incorporate a little bit of Japanese philosophy. He's keen to clarify the idiom's actual meaning, though. "In the rough English translation we might think about it as an opportunity for yourself, whereas in Japanese it's more about the way you conduct yourself when you're talking with someone on the other side of the table. It's that every chance you have to talk to someone, it might be the last time in your life you meet this person, whether it's this interview we're having today or you're meeting a customer. So you want to leave a mark on each other's life forever and give it your best shot."