My name is Mathieu Mayer. I was born in 1986 in Marseille, France. I’m a designer and a developer. I’ve been living in Japan since 2013. These days, I live in Kyoto with my wife and our two children.
I’ve been fascinated by electronics, computers, and pretty much anything related to them since I was twelve.
My mum got us our first computer around that time. Just a few months later, a friend came over with a pirated copy of Half-Life, and we spent the whole day playing it, completely blown away. That moment sent my interest in video games through the roof. Diablo, StarCraft, Counter-Strike, Caesar II, Age of Empires, Warcraft III, and later Dark Age of Camelot and World of Warcraft. I played them all. A lot.
It was also around then that I started making small websites with FrontPage and Dreamweaver. A friend of mine was really into Adobe Flash, so I’d help him make assets in Photoshop. At the same time, I started learning Japanese outside of school, hoping to understand games before they were localized. Back then, it could take years for Japanese games to reach Europe, that is if they made it at all.
When I was 15, I convinced my mum to sign me up for a one-year exchange program with AFS. Japan was, of course, my first choice, followed by mainland China and New Zealand. At 16, I left for Japan for a year. I stayed with a Japanese family in Yokosuka, Kanagawa, and went to the local high school.
At 17, I returned to France and met the girl who would one day become my wife. We shared many beautiful moments in France, and in 2013, I managed to convince her to move to Japan with me. I was 27. I started working at a design studio called AQ, where I made good friends. Later, I freelanced for a while before joining a company in early 2024 as a full-time employee. We’re a small product team of four, and I handle everything design related, from early concepts and prototypes to final implementation.