I've told this story to many friends over the course of the last near-decade, and 2023 marks the 10 year anniversary of my getting hired into my first job as an artist for video games. This will be a bit of a long one. This is actually mostly a story about my boss and it truly was the jumping directly into ice cold water wake-up to what working as a professional artist might be like. I laugh at a lot of this, then and now, but I also have over the years realized the deep trauma it left in me. I hope this is funnier than it is depressing but we'll see.
In the Fall of 2013 I am living with my parents as a fresh BFA grad, and have been looking for a job for approximately 6 months. My mental health is not especially good. I have a short phone interview with a man from a mobile game company I applied for a job with through craigslist for an art internship. I am asked to come in for an interview and it is the most exciting thing I can imagine: It's happening.
I am interviewed at the same time and in the same room as the two other candidates by the man who will be my boss. This is mostly a story about him. Brëno is a mononym portmanteau of his first and last names that he goes by. The accent above the e is to try and get Siri to use the shorter "eh" sound instead of pronouncing it like "Breen-oh". It is not totally effective. He is in his early to mid 40s and dresses like a 19 year-old rave kid. He has a very long, immaculately groomed red beard, a 3.5x4 inch shaved square of very short hair on top, and blue-tinted, square-rim glasses. He is friendly and relaxed in the exact kind of way that should put you on full alert if you are paying attention, but I am not because I am about to score my first game art job. There is an unpaid art test over the next 48 hours. This is how I get in.
What is Cozmix?
The job is for a game called Cozmix. I am a multipurpose 2D artist and I am now both an intern being paid a whopping $500 CAD/month and also the lead artist of the game. Cozmix is pitched to us as a trans-media empire. A Neopets-like social network with physical collectibles that turn into digital creatures to evolve and upgrade. I am almost certain we are funded by the mafia. My third day on the job Breno tells me he is meeting with our investors. "They're italian dudes that run construction companies and they're not the mob," is the exact quote he tells me. They have given Breno half a million dollars to make this project. It has been in development for 2.5 years when I come on board. Nearly every person making this game has been an intern being paid $500 a month for a few month stint.
When I begin the project, the story of Cozmix goes something like this: Kaiden is a normal boy who, at a 7-11-like convenience store, is sucked into another world by a slushy machine, which is actually god. Now Kaiden must collect creatures made out of slushie, called "Dojen" (pronounced exactly like "doujin", no relation) in order to become one of the slushy machine's jedi-equivalent, the Kodo (which Breno insists means "children of the drum"). This is in order to fight a cute, little, evil, pink creature named Voido who wants to destroy the universe. Breno is convinced that no villain in the history of fiction has ever wanted to destroy the universe. "Take over, maybe, but not destroy," he would say. Kaiden goes to different, themed planets, collects Dojen, fights evil and builds up their town with a town-building mobile game interface to help defeat Voido and his human thrall, Weeber.
Between the beginning and the end of my time there, the type of game and the story has drastically shifted. Breno was the type of guy who went dancing every night, and would get home and write down all his high ideas into a single google doc 100s of pages long. The 2.5 year development cycle of this non-game design document is the reason that when I was brought on board no characters had been animated and almost every aspect of it was still in a mock-up state. I often had hour-long meetings in a park next to the studio where he would smoke a joint and tell me about how the game would literally change the world. By the end of my time on the project the story of Cozmix was this: In the beginning there was only the cold, dark void, but the GID the god who is a slushy machine who is also a DJ made the Big Drip that creating everything (out of slushy). The cold dark void turned into Voido. To combat Voido's evil, GID created the Kodo, a sacred order of DJs who listen to EDM to open their third eye. This allows them to travel into each other's heads to practice summoning and battling Dojen in order to combat Voido's schemes. There was only one song in this game and it was not EDM.
A Brief History of the Man Named Brëno
Let's back up a bit and tell you what I am told Breno's story is leading up to this. He worked, as far as I can recall, in toy manufacturing either in or closely tied to a Chinese toy company. He quits that job and goes to live in a temple in Nepal for somewhere in the range of 3 years. He gets an idea. It is hard for me to put into words, but I have this diagram to describe it and he tells me that the president of Disney Japan (who he may or may not have actually met) told him it was a good idea.
It was like a button for your shirt only more annoying to put on and it would slowly bore a large hole in your shirt as you wore it. The idea is that the graphic button could be any number of things that could be freely replaced. This is where he decides he needs to make this into a trans-media/collectibles empire, gets his funding and then hires a game company to begin that process by making a video game: the classic way you start a trans-media empire. And, like any good video game-based trans-media empire about collecting things, it was shameless ripping off Pokémon.
"Viral Potential"
Breno was obsessed with this idea that these Dojen creatures had to have "viral potential" and he was convinced that the way to do that was make a lot of things poop themed. These two Dojen (above) were named Yuck Norris and Pooce Lee. They were rivals and they did Kung Poo. Another creature shot marshmellows out of her ass. Her ultimate attack had her shoot an icbm (inter-continental butt marshmellow). Another creature (not pictured, I don't have access to these anymore), a rhino with a rainbow horn, would pelvic thrust at you.
Breno was always going to business conferences to try and find investors or learn how to better shill his products. At one of these, he charmed a man he'd met who had an 11 year-old son (his target demographic). He convinced this man to bring his son to the studio to see the game and react to it. While discussing the "viral potential" of these characters, Breno demonstrated pelvic thrusting to this 11 year-old and his dad. "That's not appropriate," the dad said. After they had left, Breno insisted that we keep it in the game anyway because he felt the dad was too uptight about his pelvic thrusting 2 feet from his son's face.
Changing Art Style and Animation
All of these character designs existed as static concept art when I joined the project. There was no animation. I got another artist friend of mine hired to animate them. He was fired after about a week.
I had been designing our menus and in particular the character select screen as the game pivoted more towards fighting. I made rendered art of some of the characters to make their character selection seem cooler and more dynamic. Breno took 1 look at my version and decided the whole game now needed to look like that. I was brought on as a non-intern artist paid a much less illegal but still insulting $12/hour.
Both Breno and the CEO of the studio were convinced that Breno had a magic eye for what looked good. I found he was like George Lucas making the Phantom Menace a lot of the time, though, actively pursuing the worst-looking option. Taking credit for your victories because he would have you change one tiny detail (sometimes something as little as shifting something by <5 pixels). His original logo for Cozmix was literally the Pokemon font but purple and green instead of yellow and blue. He asked me if the logo was embossed or "debossed". I said it looked embossed and it made him so upset that he got the company's art director to come in and agree with him that it was "debossed". The art director also said it was embossed. Breno yelled at us that we didn't know what we were talking about. That art director was a cool guy and we're still friends.
In order to animate my characters, Breno hired an animation studio with money he did not have. When they produced sub-par results with the little they had been given he refused to pay them. The rest of the time I worked on the project, Breno was in and out of litigation with this company. He then hired an animator named Mitch Rose, one of animators of the Monstars in Space Jam and this Nesquik ad you may remember from the late 90s. Breno had somehow gotten another quarter of a million dollars from our Italian construction guys who weren't the mob. Mitch was actually pretty cool. He showed me a bunch of his blue pencils from Space Jam and talked about how ridiculous it was working on that movie. He talked about doing vis-dev on Tarzan, how they used his gorilla designs after firing him and did not credit him at all. He had no legal recourse. It was sad to see this very talented guy have to work on this game.
My art style was, at best, much harder to work with. By the end we had selected only 6 monsters to be in the playable demo, very well animated by Mitch. Only one was one of my original character designs, the rest were adapted from the original art style. 3 out of the 6 were poop-themed. Here was the line-up.
Abuse, The End, Getting Laid Off
About 3 or 4 months in I was designing the in-game currency UI. When I misinterpreted something Breno had said he asked me if I was "borderline [REDACTED ableist slur]". I talked to my parents that night about delivering an ultimatum of some kind. They urged me to stay calm and keep working because it was unclear if I'd ever be able to get another game job. They have told me more recently how much they regret that. I confronted him about it the next day. He blamed me for it and I did not accept that. He blamed the project manager, who was not involved. Then he told me that he would not attempt to improve his behaviour. He did not apologize at any point. I am told by interns I met from before my era that he would pull the hair of one of the female artists to get her to pay attention to him.
In the late spring of 2014 it became clear that the project would die. They couldn't wring any more money out of their investors, no one was interested in publishing it. The game studio we worked out of tried to hire me onto another project, because they liked me. Breno confronted the CEO, telling him that he was stealing his talent. They were friends and the hiring process was stopped. He confronted me, claiming he was the victim here in spite of literally not being able to keep paying me past the next couple of weeks. I was laid off in June. The last thing I did for the game was design a comic sequence of the two shits fighting. Breno called it PvP: Poo Vs Poo. The game studio finally hired me 3 months later on a game I shipped. That game bombed and I was let go again in late 2015.
This is what the PvP Comic looked like.
For years after I'd see him at games industry events and he refused to talk to me because I was "not nice to him". Breno went on to have a very failed emoji-based project using the same weird button design, then lived out of a van in LA for several years. The last I heard from him was a page-long facebook message in 2021 that I think was trying to tease an NFT launch but read more like a cult recruitment.
