Q-GAMES

How Dylan Cuthbert went from Nintendo and PlayStation to the Kyoto indie scene

- ALAN WEN

Nintendo isn't Kyoto's only videogame company. Nor, indeed, its most central at least geographically speaking. While Nintendo's headquarters are a little out of the way, in the Shimogyo-ku district, we find Q-Games right in the city's heart, amid the museums and the bustling Nishiki Market. The local influence has been tangible in the studio's work right from its 2006 debut, Digidrive: the final instalment in GBA's Japan-only Bit Generations series, its puzzle mechanics were inspired by traffic police guiding floors during Kyoto's Gian Festival.

Not that founder Dylan Cuthbert is from these parts originally. In the early '90s, barely out of his teens, he was among the precocious team from British studio Argonaut Software to be flown out to work with Nintendo. A culture shock, surely, not least because at that time the country and company had considerably fewer foreigners than today. But recalling his time spent programming the original Star Fox, just down the road, Cuthbert says: "When I was there, there was almost an indie vibe. There is kind of a hierarchy but everyone is in their place, and within that you have loads of freedom. So you don't really feel like you're in a hierarchy at all.

It's strict in the sense that everyone has to get in on time, but when it came to having that camaraderie in making games, it felt more like being on a university campus." A decade later, after a stint at Sony Computer Entertainment, in 2001 Cuthbert became one of the first foreigners to establish a studio on Japanese soil. In the years since, it's become something of a beacon for other expat developers. Within a one-mile radius we also find Chuhai Labs (formerly Vitei Backroom), founded by Cuthbert's erstwhile colleague Giles Goddard, Song In The Smoke developer 17-Bit, and new upstart Denkiworks, co-founded by Liam Edwards, who has worked at both Chuhai and Q-Games.