STUDIO PROFILE

How remodelling the past for modern audiences turned Québécois dreams into reality

BY NIALL O’DONOGHUE

Overcome with emotion, Thierry Boulanger sat and cried. It was a series of firsts for the Canadian: his first time in Japan, his first time at Kyoto’s BitSummit festival, and the first time meeting his childhood heroes. It was earlier on, while Boulanger was snacking at a food truck, that he had received the text: the creator and composer of Ninja Gaiden were playing the demo of his new game, The Messenger. Right now. “I probably littered – just threw my food on the ground and left,” Boulanger laughs today.

Both Hideo Yoshizawa and Keiji Yamagishi were taken with the game, even asking Boulanger to pose for a photograph at the booth (hence the ugly-crying in the bathroom). Indeed, Yamagishi would eventually contribute two pieces of music for The Messenger, including one simply titled Succession.

This wouldn’t be the last time that Sabotage Studio took on an old-school genre and updated it for modern audiences, nor would it be Boulanger’s last time presenting at BitSummit. It wouldn’t even be the studio’s last time working with an iconic Japanese game composer. Since that fateful meeting in Kyoto, Sabotage Studio has established itself as one of the industry’s premiere neo-retro developers, most recently tackling the RPG genre with the acclaimed Sea Of Stars, itself a succession to classics such as Chrono Trigger. Yet the studio’s journey goes back even further than Square’s masterpiece, to a basement in Canada where a young Boulanger began a lifelong love affair.

Boulanger was three when his older brother was given an NES, a moment he can still recall in vivid detail. “The first frame I saw, my entire soul was like: that’s gonna be it for me,” he says. “I was a hardcore ’90s kid, into the super-clichéd stuff. It really resonated with me, and on some level I never got over it.”