Amin Abbas

Masahiko Murakami is a talented Japanese video game producer and CEO of Skeleton Crew Studio, a video game studio based in Kyoto that consists of a multinational team from around the globe with a passion for creating games and VR content.

Murakami shared how from “the very beginning, my inspiration for making and using video games was daily communication with friends, drinking, and enjoying meals with other people. I also find a large amount of inspiration from everyday life, the natural world around us and the environments we live in.”

Murakami began “working in the game industry around 2007 when I lived in San Francisco. After I graduated from Art university there, I had the chance to work with very talented artists on projects such as Dead Space and The Sims at EA. To me, games are a way to communicate without borders and languages, and doing what I loved in a digital space was a great place to start.”

About the establishment of Skeleton Crew Studio and its concept, Murakami said: “We started almost six years ago. Our first original game, BackSlash, was based on old fashioned kung-fu movies that exhibited a wide variety of fighting styles. We wanted the animation to match those old styles for that game. Our first VR project was Ghost Attackers VR, an arcade VR game for VR Park Tokyo; it was fashioned around visual styles from the Ghostbusters movies as well as haunted houses.”

Skeleton Crew Studio is known for developing “Olija” video game which released last year, developed by game designer Thomas Olsson who started the development around the end of BackSlash in 2018 “to expand his personal art style and see how far he could take his ideas in that world. Olija is an amalgamation of his life in Asia and what it’s like to be a foreigner in a strange land.”

“We wanted Thomas to feel free to tell his own story, and if you play the game you can see how that thread weaves through the whole experience. Our studio is so heavily focused on using heavyweight technology (VR, AR, online) so having a 2D story-based game that’s completely unrelated to our day-to-day business really feels fantastic,” he added.

Murakami stresses how their games are built on passion, and that is reflected in the end result.

“Right now, we have employees from 17 different countries/territories and every single member brings a fresh perspective on what makes a game great. I love that even though we are from so many different places and cultures, we all feel like we belong to one family,” he said.

Speaking of Skeleton Crew Studio upcoming projects, Murakami said:” As a studio, we would love to branch our existing online experiences in a game direction, and of course we have a follow-up to Olija already in the works! We also have many prototypes and one-off game projects, both VR and traditional.”

Murakami offered advice to aspiring video game developers, encouraging them to take risks, and start with a project to hone the skills necessary