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From the release of SpaceChem in 2011 through to Last Call BBS in 2022, indie developer Zachtronics was a legend in the admittedly small world of puzzle games that are a bit like programming a computer. While the studio made a variety of games, including a prescient visual novel about AI called Eliza, its specialty was a kind of engineering puzzle all about refining your input to create the ideal output—games that came to be known as Zach-likes.
“I hate saying Zach-like,” says Zach Barth, who both Zachtronics and the Zach-like were named after. “If anybody has any suggestions for a different thing we can call them?”
Zach Barth’s next game, Kaizen: A Factory Story, will certainly be, er, Zach-adjacent. It’s about running a factory in Japan in the 1980s, manufacturing products ranging from toys to electronics to clothes, refining the process for each item to make it as smooth as possible. “We have an electric toilet seat,” Barth says. “That’s one of the puzzles. Like, that’s one of my favorites.”
Zachtronics is no more, however, having shut down following the release of Last Call BBS and a final collection of solitaire games. Kaizen is the work of a new studio called Coincidence, which consists of Barth and several of his Zachtronics collaborators like writer, producer, and audio designer Matthew Burns.
“It’s not a Zachtronics game,” Barth says. “This is a Coincidence game, which is a totally legally distinct game studio.”
Coincidence represents a fresh start, and an opportunity to approach the puzzle of how to make a machine-engineering puzzle game that’s welcoming to new players from a new angle.
As Barth puts it, “One of the big things we’ve been wrestling with for a long time is that you build this machine, you hit play, you watch it run, it breaks, you say ‘fuck’, and you hit stop. Then you’re like, ‘Wait, where was I? Where were things when it broke?’ You can build something that’s really elaborate, that has many steps, and you don’t remember what happened along the way, and you can’t edit it until you reset.”
Which is why in Kaizen we’ll be able to scrub each construction attempt back and forth like we’re trying to understand what someone is saying in a Christopher Nolan movie we’re watching on a phone. If the toy robot our factory’s making today ends up with the arms and legs in the wrong positions, we’ll be able to scrub back, swap things around, and try again.
So why make it about the specific world of Japanese consumer goods in the boomtime 1980s?
“It’s an area of history and a location that we’ve always kind of been interested in,” says Burns, “because fundamentally, the games that we make are about making things. And this was a time period where the things that were made weren’t just successful as products, but successful as things that we remember today.”
This is the era of the Sony Walkman, of Japanese camcorders and computers and consoles, VCRs and TVs and microwaves. It’s the reason all those 1980s cyberpunk books and movies predicted a future where Atari would be a world-conquering megacorporation and everyone would be eating ramen in the rain.
“I was able to integrate some stuff that I remember from growing up,” says Burns, “because I’m half-Japanese, my mom is from Tokyo. So we decided to tell this story about a Japanese-American main character whose name is David, and he goes to Japan to work at a Japanese company at the height of this ‘Japan is taking over’ thing.
“We hint at this a little bit in the game, it’s not like a main point of it, but we hint at the media environment in the US at this time, which was that the US was panicking about the Japanese economic machine. There were all kinds of concerned news programs and business books and even movies about ruthless Japanese businessmen taking over American business and, oh no, they’re going to kill us. They’re all samurai warriors!”
I mention the Michael Crichton book Rising Sun, and especially the movie version with Sean Connery and Wesley Snipes, and Barth and Burns say they recently watched the trailer and laughed at how ridiculous it is. It’s a perfect example of the popular perception of the time that Japan was an economic powerhouse because everyone had a code of Bushido honor and a black belt.
Burns mentions part of the research for Kaizen was a more accurate book called Inventing Japan. “That book does a great job of demolishing the stereotype of ‘Japanese people are good at business because of samurai stuff that happened, like, 400 years prior’. People used to say things like that. ‘The Japanese prioritized loyalty because of samurai culture.’ This book is like, look, that was so long ago. That would be like saying Europeans are good at business because there used to be knights in shining armor.”
Instead, Kaizen is about the philosophy of revision and iteration that actually helped Japan rebuild itself after World War 2.
“It’s a word that means continuous improvement,” says Barth, “but it’s also the word that Toyota, when they were designing their production quality control system, used to refer to empowering people who work on the line to make improvements from the bottom up instead of the top down. If somebody whose job is to put screws in can think of a way to make those screws go in faster or more reliably, they’re encouraged to speak up and bring that up and make that improvement. I think that’s a really cool idea.”
All the way back to SpaceChem, kaizen has been the hidden philosophy behind the Zach-like. Continuous improvement from the smallest details up to the top is the common element of all these puzzle games. Well, that and a solitaire minigame. “We don’t have to put a solitaire game in every game,” Barth says. “It just keeps happening.”
In Kaizen, the solitaire game has pachinko as its theme—pachinko being another success story of the 1980s, becoming more complicated and compulsive as it turned electronic. Like most gambling machines, pachinko’s not actually fun to play if there’s no money involved, however, which is why in Kaizen it’s presented as solitaire. “It’s the first solitaire game I’ve ever made that has gravity in it,” Barth says.
Kaizen: A Factory Story doesn’t have a release date yet, but you can find it on Steam.
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Kurt Indovina
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