Wednesday, 3 September, 2025 UTC
Summary
From his early days at SEGA, through Q Entertainment, to his current role as founder and CEO of Enhance Games, Tetsuya Mizuguchi has long pursued the convergence of emotion, games, and technology. With the upcoming Lumines Arise, he and his team are bringing their stunning musical puzzler to VR for the first time.
“When I first saw a video game, it was in black and white,” Tetsuya Mizuguchi tells me with a reminiscent smile. “It was Pong. Atari. I was nine or ten years old, and my friend’s house was a toy shop. That was a good friend to have.”
I’m on a video call with Mizuguchi to discuss the development of Lumines, but the conversation quickly blooms. From the experiences that inspired him to become a game developer and his earliest days in the industry, to his current projects and his feelings about virtual reality and the future, Mizuguchi (or Miz, as he’s graciously said I may call him) walks me along the through-line of his career with characteristic thoughtfulness. He continues listing games that made a major impact.
“I played Xenon 2, an Amiga game by the Bitmap Brothers,” he says. “That was a shooter, and the music was amazing. I understood this was not made by a typical game developer. It was people who loved music, and who loved technology, new expressions, new media.”
“In school, I had studied media aesthetics, meaning the [mixing] of art, technology, and the media of the future,” he says. “I wanted to direct music videos. But when I graduated university, many great music videos already existed. So, I thought, ‘What’s Next?’”
Japanese game centers offered a glimpse of the answer. SEGA AM2’s R360, a massive ball-shaped cockpit arcade cabinet released in 1990, could spin 360 degrees in any direction, allowing the player inside to freely move in response to the in-game action. It featured a four-point safety harness and was designed to rotate completely upside down, bringing incredible immersion to SEGA’s flight-sim games. Mizuguchi was impressed.
Promotional flyer for SEGA's R360 arcade cabinet, which so inspired Mizuguchi.“This was a totally new experience. I was a gamer, and all the coolest cabinets had the SEGA logo, so I wanted to work for SEGA. And already, I could see a future in which virtual reality would be a massive thing.”
As he speaks, a theme emerges: it’s all been about technology and emotion. He was drawn to games that stretched the constraints of the medium, arcade cabinets that pushed the boundaries of sensory stimuli, companies, and people who were at the forefront of experimental gaming experiences. It’s all connected.
In 2001, Mizuguchi and his colleagues at SEGA produced Rez, a synesthetic musical rail-shooter which Miz describes as “the type of experience that I’m here to make.”
Rez’s ambitious melding of sound, visuals, and gameplay in an abstract way, as well as its unusually presented theme and story, in which a hacker plunges into a digital world to liberate a trapped AI, made for a hard sell at the turn of the millennium. Though it has gone on to become a beloved classic, Rez was underappreciated at launch, no doubt hamstrung by its late release on its unfortunately ill-fated native console, the SEGA Dreamcast.
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Gameplay clips of Rez, played on SEGA Dreamcast and captured by UploadVR
“I remember people saying Rez was ahead of its time,” Mizuguchi says. “It’s true that Rez was not a commercially successful game. It asked for deep immersion from the player, and it was abstract not just visually, but emotionally. Not many games were made that way back then. But as a creator, you want as many people as possible to experience your creations. So I spent time thinking, ‘How can I get something like this to a larger audience?’”
Mizuguchi’s answer was Lumines, a game that he hoped would take the synesthetic sensibilities he'd cultivated with Rez, and introduce them in a more approachable format.
In Lumines, 2x2 blocks made of different patterns and colors fall from above while a sweeping sequencer line erases matched colors. The sweep comes in musical time, and as you place blocks, the inputs create musical notes and beats, so that your actions move in time with (and help create) the music you’re listening to.
Released in 2004, Lumines arrived alongside Sony’s PSP handheld console and became the first of Mizuguchi’s style of distinctly synesthetic games to sell over a million copies. Now more than two decades later, Lumines Arise returns not to replicate the original experience or capitalize on nostalgia (though it’s doing that on its own, if social media is any indicator), but to use new technology to expand on the original idea in meaningful ways.
Coming to PS5 and PC, and for the first time in the series to VR headsets, Arise intends to amplify the emotional impact of the original. As with Mizuguchi’s previous reimaginings of Rez and Tetris (he produced 2018’s massively successful musical puzzler Tetris Effect), Lumines Arise may be the closest we get to his original vision.
Lumines debuted on the PSP in 2004. Now, Lumines Arise aims to update the classic formula for modern platforms and VR.
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“It was the same with Rez,” he says. “We wanted to revisit Rez and bring it to a whole new level. How can we bring a new experience for you to feel and live through? For us, experience is king, and synesthesia is queen. But above all of that is a word we use in Japanese called Kando. It means emotions, or how you share emotionally moving experiences. And that lives at the top of what we do.”
“It’s a portal,” he says. “Our hope is that when you play or experience our games, you discover your own emotions and experiences. Whether it’s through rhythms or vibrations, or you have this euphoric sort of moment, our hope is that it’s not just about how much fun you have, but that there’s so much more meaning to it.”
Lumines Arise is heading to PlayStation VR2 and PC VR on November 11. As for releasing Arise on additional platforms, Enhance isn't ruling anything out. “Our hope is that we can, as you’ve seen with the rest of our games!”