Most of us have at some point experienced the phenomenon that is the Tetris effect – the term coined to describe the way Alexey Pajitnov’s seminal puzzler tapped into the subconsciousnesses of players who’d spent a lot of time playing the game. Tetsuya Mizuguchi is better acquainted with it than most – he did, after all, produce a game titled after it. And over the Christmas holiday in 2017, he experienced that sensation anew – or something close to it, at least. Prior to finishing work for the festive season, his final appointment was as a judge at a Unity showcase in Tokyo, where Kentaro Yama, a developer at design studio Tha Ltd, was giving a presentation. Mesmerised by what he saw on the screen, Mizuguchi found it occupying his waking and sleeping thoughts throughout his winter break. But it wasn’t falling blocks he saw in his dreams. It was people. Milling around in their thousands; cascading from platform edges; arcing through the air, arms flailing desperately: there’s a hypnotic quality to the mindless masses of Humanity, such that you immediately realise what Mizuguchi saw in it. The two had previously met years before, and Mizuguchi was aware of Nakamura’s work – “There’s something about his design philosophy that speaks to me in a very architectural way,” the Enhance founder says. But this had captured his imagination like nothing else before.
There was, however, one small fly in the ointment: it wasn’t actually a game at all. The brainchild of Tha’s founder, award-winning Web designer this simulation had been created as “a project that basically dealt with crowds and how organically they move, and their behaviour and interactions,” Nakamura says via a video call from Enhance’s Tokyo office, where he sits alongside the man everyone refers to simply as ‘Miz’. “As we were working on that, at some point in time, we were wondering: how would this work as a game? Or how could thisa game?”
