This is an GenAI translated version of Hirano Bunchou’s blog / ebook “The Little Game Shop in the Forest” (original available here).
Hirano-san worked at Technos Japan in the early 1980’s and played a pivotal role in games like The Big Pro-Wrestling.
Copyright in both the text and the images rests with the original author.
Chapter 2: The Interview
The video game company where I was going to have my interview was called “The Little Game Shop in the Forest.” It was located on the third floor of a run-down apartment building, a short distance away from the busiest part of the Urban Forest.
When I rang the doorbell at the company entrance, it chimed, and a cat girl came out from inside, saying, “Yeees?”
“Oh, you’re here for the interview, right? We’ve been expecting you. Please come in!”
Smiling, the cat girl led me inside and had me sit on a sofa for guests. The office was a slightly spacious single-room workspace, and four employees were working there.
At the desk closest to me was a bird wearing headphones, with a slightly scary face, nodding his head to a rhythm while staring at a computer screen. Next to him was a gloomy-looking mole wearing round glasses, muttering to himself while typing into a word processor on his computer. Next to him was a very serious-looking dog, hammering away at the keyboard at machine-gun speed: clack-clack-clack-clack. And at the desk by the window at the very back was a fox in his early thirties, staring fixedly out at the blue sky.
(This is a really small company… and they’re all such strange animals. Well, the cat girl is cute, at least…)
I started to feel a little uneasy.
“President, the applicant is here!”
When the cat girl said this to the fox, the fox stood up smartly and walked briskly over to me. It seemed he was the president of the company.
“Welcome. I’m Falcon, the representative of this company. May I see your résumé and your portfolio?”
President Falcon began to look through the documents I handed him. The employees who had been working all glanced sideways at me, but when I looked back at them, they all quickly looked away at the same time.
“Do you like video games?” President Falcon looked up from my résumé and asked.
“B—? Ah, yes. Of course!” I lied.
(I’m pretty shrewd, aren’t I?)
“Bubu, your illustrations are very good. However, at our company we don’t draw on paper. Is that all right with you?”
“B—? What do you mean?”
I didn’t understand what the president meant.
“Then please come this way.”
President Falcon led me over to the dog who was hammering at the keyboard like a machine gun. For some reason, there was an arcade game table set up next to the dog’s desk.
“Zero-One, could you start up the tool?”
“Got it—woof!”
The dog named Zero-One lightly tapped the keyboard, and on the television screen of the arcade table next to him, a strange grid pattern appeared.
“This is where you’ll be drawing.”
“B—? Here… on this?”
When I looked puzzled, President Falcon said to Zero-One again, “Show him that.”
“Got it—woof!”
Zero-One tapped the keyboard again. Then, inside the grid on the screen, a blocky picture of a monkey appeared, and it started moving in a simple, jerky animation.
I was shocked.
“This is called dot art,” President Falcon said, smiling as he watched my mouth hang open in surprise.
Notes
In this Chapter, our protagonist goes for a job interview at a company that is definitely not Technos Japan, lies about liking video games, and is introduced to pixel art for the first time.
The dog character is called “Zero-Wan” in Japanese, which is arguably a triple-pun. Firstly, “wan” is the Japanese equivalent of “woof”. Secondly, “Zero-One” is the name of a Japanese pro-wrestling company. Lastly (and most tenuously), as this character is a computer programmer, you could say that “Zero-One” is a reference to binary digits.
