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MAGFest Interview: Chris Kohler!
By Kevin - 01.21.04
Chris Kohler is a freelance video game journalist. He has lived/studied in Japan and has been published in Wired Magazine, Nintendo Magazine UK, Animerica and many others, as well as the academic journal Kyoto Journal. He is currently writing Super Mario Nation, which he discusses in the interview. Originally recorded on November 2nd at the tail end of MAGFest, Chris was nice enough to sit down and talk with me about games, the Fulbright program, being published and the nature of being a video game journalist. Links to many of his published works, as well as his personal takes on gaming/life in general can be found at Kobun Heat.
Kevin - How did you decide where you wanted to go to college and what was your major as an undergrad?
Chris - I decided that I wanted to go to Yale University: unfortunately I didn't get in. I had also
applied to schools that had journalism classes and schools that had Japanese language instruction. I
got into the rest of the schools I applied to. The two I was deciding between were Tufts University,
up by Cambridge, MA, and NYU. I wanted to go to NYU, my parents wanted me to go to Tufts. Tufts ended
up being more expensive than NYU, and I ended up getting a great scholarship to NYU. However, my
parents were not happy with me going to New York City. I started to look at Tufts and they had a much
better Japanese program and a lot more study abroad opportunities to Japan, so I decided on Tufts. I
never looked back, I thought it was a really great decision.
Kevin - How did you get into the Fulbright Program, what sorts of things were involved with that, and
was it hard to convince them to let you go to Japan?
Chris - They take twelve or thirteen people. The Fulbright Fellow program to Japan is separate from
the other program. It's still a Fulbright, but they separate it out for graduating seniors. I applied
for the program, but had already been to Japan my Junior year on a Tufts-sponsored program, so I already
had the experience. That actually counted as a strike against me, because they like people with less
experience for these sorts of programs. At the same time, what they look for is a very well thought-out
project, project that is going to pack your future career. So I said "I have been training to be a
video game journalist all this time," so obviously this project was going to affect me in a big way, as
opposed to people who had divergent career goals and whose projects seemed like an afterthought. My
project was part and parcel to what I was doing.
Kevin - I know you've been a gamer your whole life, and you've probably known from an early age that
you wanted to do something with games when you grew up. Where did you get your start, where were you
first published, and what pushed you toward journalism as opposed to developing?
Chris - It could have been my best friend in fourth grade who came in and he had written up a magazine
called "Codes for Every Month," and it was written on notebook paper. It was just codes copied out of
that month's Nintendo Power. I thought "Wow, what a great idea." By sixth grade, we were hitting it
big time - we had it on non-ruled paper, and we had had his mom make ten copies of it and we passed it
out to our class. What evolved from that was that I started to do a much better version, and eventually
my brother suggested the name "Video Zone." I don't know where he got that from, but I started to do a
fanzine called "Video Zone." That was right exactly when Microsoft Publisher 1.0 and I said to myself
"You know what, now I can make a magazine, so I'm going to try." It didn't come out too great, but at 13
years old, I wrote better than most of the 17 year-olds writing about video games, I was a smart kid as
far as writing went. I sent it in to the second incarnation of Electronic Games with Arnie Katz as
editor in '93 and they ran it in their October '93 issue and then I got other fanzines to trade. It
went about like that for about six months before I got a lot better. In about six issues, I got it
right. I slowed it down from being monthly, but at 13 you have a lot of time to do a fanzine. It is a
bunch of the same stuff I'm doing now, but just that much worse. It was ten years ago. When I was 16,
a sophomore in high school, Viz, who publishes Animerica, and had a magazine called Game-On U.S.A. It
was styled with a black & white manga in the middle of their magazine: they were doing Samurai Showdown
and Super Street Fighter II. It was a start-up kind of a thing. I sent in my fanzines because they
wanted to do a fanzine review column. Then the editor, Jason Thompson, he's a friend of mine nowadays,
asked if I wanted to do some writing for them. I wrote one article for them, but the magazine ended up
not succeeding, it was off after seven issues. But then they said that they wanted me to write for
their website: it wasn’t as much money, but it was like $15 for a 500 word review. After two years of
that, they finally said "Hey, Julie, the editor of Animerica wants to expand the game reviews section,"
so I started doing that. Then I just did reviews more and more for Animerica, and I started to make my
first contact with game companies, saying "Yeah, I work for Animerica, I want to get free copies of your
games." Animerica's game reviews section has since grown and I take credit for a lot of that, in terms
of really getting the name out there and making it a legitimate games section. Unfortunately, I don't
get any of the benefits of that - all the people on the staff now get all the benefits of that,
including going to parties, getting free shit, getting wined'n dined. I try to scrape out what I can,
and I'm not too bitter about it. After I had been writing for Animerica for four years, a friend from
Wired was researching an article and kept bumping into my byline. I met up with him at E3 and he said
"You've gotta pitch this, you've gotta write some stories for us." That was a year ago, and I started
writing for Wired. Nintendo Magazine UK took me out of the blue because of an interview I did with
someone else, I sold them a Miyamoto interview. A lot of it was going to Japan on that scholarship. I
got a column at Games Domain, doing a monthly column called "Chris Kohler's Kyoto Game Panic."
Kevin - Hopefully this isn't too personal of a question, but what's the most you've been paid for any of
the writing that you've done?
Chris - Nintendo UK has not paid me yet, but that might be the biggest paycheck.
Kevin - What is it approximately: I'm sure that people will be interested to see what you can make doing
the sort of work that you do.
Chris - It's just not a big amount of money. It's a good amount of money. Nintendo UK's freelance
budget, all of which is going to me at this point, is 60 pounds a page, which is about $100 a page.
$100 for 400 words. Wired pays more - they pay about a dollar a word. Animerica pays about 10 cents a
word, but I get to write a lot more. I loved writing for Animerica because I could write a huge for
them and they'll print the whole thing. Wired can't let me write that much.
Kevin - It's the same with some film criticism: you do capsule reviews for big publications, you don't
write as much but you get paid more. Then you do what you love, but those are the ones that don't pay
as much.
Chris - Yes.
Kevin - You're writing a book called Super Mario Nation. Can you encapsulate your thesis in a small
little user-friendly way: what is the book about?
Chris - What is the difference between the video games that were being made in the late 1970s and the
video games that are being made today? It isn't so much that the graphics are better or that the sound
is better, but that the games are totally different. Game design has moved almost entirely, in every
genre, to an emphasis on use of "storylines," even sports games which are adding seasons modes and
conflicts between managers and what have you. Where did this happen? I'm not going to say that this
wouldn't have happened if there were no such place as Japan, but from the earliest days on, cinematic
elements (story, character, narrative) have been added into Japanese games. It starts with the very
earliest Japanese games. If you look at stuff like Space Invaders: whereas American guys were starting
with programming, Space Invaders started with Manga-type sketches. Pac-Man started with a desire to do
a game that was very colorful. The proof of this is right in the pudding. Look at the games that took
America by storm: every one is a Japanese game. Space Invaders was the first huge American video game:
Pac-Man, Frogger, Donkey Kong, the list goes on. If you watched a video game on a saturday morning
cartoon, it was Japanese. It goes on from there.
Kevin - Final-kind of question. So far in 2003, what has been the best game of the year- any system?
Chris - I didn't play Metriod Prime until 2003, but that's not a 2003 game. I played Wind Waker in 2002
because of the Japanese version, and I beat it in 2002. I would really like to say Wind Waker though, even though it is a cop-out answer.
Somebody asked me this once: "As a journalist, if you could be in a game, what game would you be in?"
What I think is important now is collaboration between Japanese and American developers. If you look at
Metal Gear Solid, the storytelling skills of the Japanese and the technical skills of
Silicon Knights, the Americans, I would have to say that I'd want to be in their game.
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