When the NPC Awakens: My Journey from Tokyo Street Gamble to AI-Powered Stardom

I didn’t grow up in Tokyo—I grew up in Austin, where the sky doesn’t glow with anime lights but with server racks and shader pipelines. At 28, after my CS thesis on procedural generation, I walked away from corporate game design and into something rawer: a system where NPCs don’t just follow scripts—they ask questions.

I used to think of gambling as ‘betting on randomness.’ Now I see it as recursive decision-making. Every spin? A node. Every win? A triggered event. I built this in Unity, not because it pays—but because it feels like your choices echo back through the algorithm.

At SXSW last year, I demoed a VR rhythm system called ‘Stardom’: no slots, no dice. Just light gradients (cyan-blue), Lowpoly textures flickering under neon signs. Players didn’t chase jackpots—they chased agency. The real jackpot? Waking up.

My budget rule? One coffee per session. Twenty minutes max. If you lose? Good. You still saw the stars—because you chose to play again tomorrow.

The final boss isn’t the house—it’s you,

Clicking ‘play’ is your first spell.

This isn’t entertainment. It’s epistemology dressed in LED.