Millions of people of all ages play video games; a smaller number aspire to develop them; and even fewer succeed in doing so. For Naperville resident Josh Tsui, working in the video game industry seemed like an unachievable dream.
“I’m a child of the 80s. So that was when the first arcade era came in and just like many other kids my age, [I was] way into video games. I didn’t think that I would ever work in games, so I went off and studied other things such as film and video and things like that,” said Josh Tsui, director of “Insert Coin.”
Josh Tsui joins Midway Games
Luckily for Tsui, a hidden level in life would emerge. As he was finishing college, he had a friend working at Chicago-based video game company Midway Games, which was looking for someone with experience in computers and video.
“This was the early 90s, so very few people knew that. But I just happened to learn that when I was in film school,” said Tsui.
Tsui joined Midway Games in 1993 as a video artist, working on all aspects of game development with a small team. His first project was “WWF WrestleMania: The Arcade Game.”
“We thought we would have to recreate the likeness of the wrestlers back in the day: Bret Hart, Bam Bam Bigelow, Razor Ramon, these classic, iconic wrestlers. It turned out that WWE was so entranced by what our company did with “Mortal Kombat,” they basically said, ‘We’re going to send our actual wrestlers to your studio and they’ll spend two days with you, and you can videotape them and get them into the game as opposed to trying to recreate them,’” said Tsui.
“For that to be the first game I ever worked on was just incredible because I’m working with these superstar celebrities and we’re just hanging out, eating hamburgers together,” he added.
Other arcade games Tsui worked on included “NHL Open Ice” and “NBA JAM Tournament Edition.” He later transitioned to home console games, contributing to “Mortal Kombat 4” and “Mortal Kombat Mythologies: Sub-Zero.”
“So we got to work on this “Mortal Kombat” adventure game with one of the main characters, Sub-Zero. That was a really interesting experiment because we got to make little movies with it that are in the game itself. This is back in the 90s, the big thing was you had a bit of gameplay, and then they would show what’s called an FMV, a full motion video, and that made me happy to work on because it kind of brought me back to my film school days, being able to work on the film production,” said Tsui.
Tsui appears in several video games
Though Tsui primarily worked behind the scenes, he also appeared in several Midway games, portraying Sub-Zero in “Mortal Kombat 2,” the face of Liu Kang in “Mortal Kombat 4,” a playable character in “NBA JAM Tournament Edition,” and several characters in “Revolution X.”
“We all participated in these games because back then we were videotaping characters and even background characters and audiences for the games, with everybody in the studio. So I’m just in all kinds of random games of that period,” said Tsui.
Tsui creates a video game company
In 1999, Tsui left Midway Games to co-found Studio Gigante with “Mortal Kombat” co-creator John Tobias and other former Midway employees. The Chicago-based company worked with Microsoft on “Tao Feng: Fist of the Lotus” and with THQ on “WWE WrestleMania 21.”
“It was just a great way for us to start. We were well-funded, we got a team put together really quickly, and it was just an amazing experience,” said Tsui.
In 2004, Studio Gigante was acquired by EA Chicago, where Tsui worked on “Fight Night Round 3” and an unreleased open-world Marvel game.
When EA Chicago shut down in 2007, Tsui launched his final video game company, Robomodo, in 2008. The company worked with Activision to produce four Tony Hawk games: “Tony Hawk: RIDE,” “Tony Hawk: SHRED,” “Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater HD,” and “Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 5.”
“Ultimately, Robomodo got acquired by a company called Reliance Entertainment, which has a gaming division. So the team went to Reliance, and then I kind of stepped away from games. I was so tired of games having been in it for 25 years, at that point. I thought it was time to take a break,” said Tsui.
Josh Tsui returns to filmmaking
He left Robomodo in 2017 to return to his first passion…filmmaking.
“I thought that might be a good time to just change everything. I thought, we’ll move out to Naperville, and I’m just going to work out of my basement on this film, and then we’ll see what happens after that,” said Tsui.
That film became “Insert Coin,” a documentary featuring interviews with industry professionals and behind-the-scenes stories of games like “Mortal Kombat” and “NBA Jam.”
“Insert Coin” played at several film festivals in its release year in 2020, opening new opportunities for Tsui, including an exhibit based on the film at the Cleve Carney Museum of Art (CCMA) at the College of DuPage.
The exhibit will remain at the museum until Feb. 16. As for what’s next, Tsui is already working on his second documentary.
“I can’t get into great details about it but it is related somewhat to video games, but it’s a combination of video games and professional sports. It’s really about how people who are very expert in one field can fail miserably at another field,” said Tsui.
Tsui hopes to release the documentary within the next two years. Having made his own set of pivots in life, he encourages others to “level up” when they see the opportunity.
“Having that attitude of deciding, ‘Is this a cool project to be on and am I going to learn something from it,’ that would catapult you forward to the next thing as you’re going along. That’s a great way to think about life and everything just kind of falls into place because of that,” said Tsui.
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