While many industry veterans now look back on their office life in the 90s and early 00s with nostalgia, it’s easy to imagine that phased out crunch culture, week-long office sleepovers and an overall unhealthy work-life balance were more than just stressful to many of the developers back in the day. In a recent X post, METAL SLUG artist Akio Oyabu (who goes by “Akio” on social media) shared an episode about a rather “unconventional” way his peers at SNK used to relieve stress.
With no roof over their heads after Irem’s Osaka branch office shut down and let go of its game development division (later known as Nasca Corporation, the studio behind METAL SLUG), Akio and his team were “saved” by SNK, who offered them to work at their offices in Esaka. And while the building looked truly majestic on the outside, the inside looked more “like Pigsty Ally from the movie Kung Fu Hustle,” Akio jokes. The hallways and offices were gloomy, slightly filthy-looking, and there were a few fist-shaped holes across the drywall.
During their tour of the building, they decided to ask one of SNK’s human resource managers (who was also their assigned tour guide) about the mysterious holes. There’s one hole for each frustration of our employees – was the answer they got. Apparently, some of the developers at SNK would “relieve their stress” by punching holes in the drywall. As Akio explains in his post, he was told that when the company chairman saw the holes made by frustrated creatives, he was not the least bit upset, commenting “I’m glad they’re full of energy” through laughter.
However, it didn’t take long until this “tradition” started rubbing off on the METAL SLUG development team as well. “A few years later, in a separate building, a huge hole appeared in the walls of our Fourth development department, courtesy of my friend Kazuma Kujo’s flying kick of rage. At the time, he was our game designer for METAL SLUG, and now he’s a developer at Granzella. Judging by the size of the hole he left, it was clear that the intensity of Kazuma’s rage far surpassed any of the other holes in the company building,” Akio remarks.
As suggested by Akio’s illustration, Kujo was using a calendar to hide the giant hole. Far from proud of his handiwork, he would tell people that the big hole in the wall was just a result of an accident, specifically him falling off a chair and piercing the drywall with his head. Reminiscing over this nostalgic episode, Akio concludes that in order to become a game developer, you need to have “passion so intense it can cause destruction of property.”
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