Keita Sakai
What you do at Tango?
As a concept artist, I try to find the perfect world design and visual style for our project, creating and proposing various artwork of stages/areas, characters, environmental props, and so on.
As leader of the art team, I’m also responsible for ensuring the quality of our team’s output.
How do you describe Tango’s development environment?
Our dev environment really feels like everyone joins together and works to make something great. We respect each other’s styles and preferences, and anyone can toss out ideas and opinions regardless of things like their section or seniority.
Hybrid work also gives us a lot of flexibility. For tasks where you need to directly collaborate with others you can go in to the office, and when you really just need to put your head down and focus on something, you can do it at home. It also makes for very good work-life balance.
What do you think makes Tango unique as a game studio?
I think Tango is a studio always on the lookout for new ideas that can give our games a unique style and personality. Not that it’s ever a straightforward process.
There’s no “right answer” when creating games, so we really appreciate the value of trial and error. Everybody shares their ideas, then we polish things down to hone in on the game’s unique personality. Sounds like an inefficient way to do things, but the payoff is worth the effort, and I think it’s part of what gives our games that “Tango” feeling.
What are your thoughts about the type of people who work at Tango?
We’re a collection of people who love to create, with strong individual preferences and ideas. It’s easy to discuss ideas, and sometimes talking them through will help you improve them, or it turns out something would be too hard to implement and so you talk and find an alternate way to do things… It feels good to have this team on your side.
Looking to the future, what are you excited for when working at Tango?
I’m looking forward to continuing to bring out each title’s individuality as we keep sharing great games from different genres with the world.
What’s something you’d like to tell someone interested in the company or working with your team?
In Tango Gameworks’s concept art team, we work hard to ensure that our art and designs fully incorporate the spirit of the title they represent, its fundamental themes and world settings.
We then consider what’s enticing about the title, then think up and propose various designs that fit into the style we’re aiming for. If you’re passionate about art’s ability to bring out and enhance a game’s appeal, then we’d love to work with you.