TOKYO -- When game designer Kenji Eno first contacted me, it had nothing to do with games and everything to do with curry.
Eno, the developer of cult classic horror games like D and Enemy Zero, and I have some mutual friends, and having read my love letter to Japanese curry he thought we should go get some together when I was in Tokyo. By total coincidence, Eno's first game in 10 years appeared on Nintendo's WiiWare service in the U.S. the day we met up, and two weeks earlier Nintendo had set us up on a trans-Pacific phone interview to talk about it.
What follows are some quotes from the interview, and details of the curry.
"There was no single huge reason that I decided to step out of videogames, but there were a lot of small ones," says Eno of his exit from the industry in 1999, after finishing the game D2 on the Sega Dreamcast. "D2 didn't sell particularly well, so I decided it was time to steap away and take a break."
"I was thinking about coming back into games sooner than I actually did," he says. "But it was hard for me to get into the mood." What jolted Eno back into the mood was the introduction of the Wii controller, he says. "One day, I was watching a streaming video on the web, just by chance, of (Nintendo president Satoru) Iwata demonstrating the Wii remote."
"After the presentation was over, I couldn't get it out of my head," he says. "It got to the point where, using a piece of paper, I made a 3D model of the controller for myself. I got in contact with people at Nintendo, and off we went."
Eno's new game, titled You, Me, and the Cubes, is a far cry from his earlier survival-horror games. It's an action/puzzle game in which one or more players throw tiny people onto a structure made of cubes, attempting to get them to balance on the cubes without falling off.
"In my head, I thought of it as an actual toy," he says. "The idea that there would be this sube here, and you and your friends would be throwing these tiny dolls, like little robots that had some intelligence, that would walk around the cube."
For dinner, Eno had an idea that I wouldn't have had myself -- instead of going to a restaurant, we went to a department store in Ebisu, a short walk from his office. The basement level of most Japanese department stores is full of small food stands selling most everything you could ever want for dinner. Tokyo Roux is in six different department stores in the area, selling a variety of different take-out curries.
Eno ordered three for us to try: "Curry de Poisson" seafood curry, "Tokyo Curry" with stewed chicken, and "Spicy Chicken Curry" that just about punched me in the mouth with searing heat. I found Tokyo Curry to be just the sort of thing I like -- it was absolutely delicious and I want to go back before I leave, although the chances of that are getting slimmer by the day.
We took it all back to Eno's office, where there is a lifesize Han Solo in carbonite falling apart in the hallway:
"I don't have any definite plans set out right now, but i don't want to tread ground covered in the past," Eno said at the conclusion of our phone interview. "What kind of games I make is going to depend on how technology evolves from here on out."
Screenshot: Nintendo, photos: Chris Kohler/Wired.com
