Chapter 5: 20% and 80%

First Year as a Full-Time Employee

On April 4, 2011, I reported to Google for the first time as a full-time employee. Google had moved from Cerulean Tower in Shibuya to Mori Tower in Roppongi Hills the previous year. I was assigned to the Google Maps team, continuing from my internship. Within the Maps team, I was assigned to a small team led by Asaka-san, which included Iwasaki-san, Hirano-san, Kishimoto-san, Tim, and was responsible for a specific feature.

The new office was more spacious and comfortable than where I had interned. Three meals a day were provided free of charge at the cafeteria, and there were even massage rooms and shower facilities. There were spaces for taking naps when tired, areas for playing video games, and places for table tennis and billiards. In this comfortable environment, everyone worked at their own pace.

Dragon Quest

At the end of 2011, while chatting over dinner with colleagues from the Google Maps team at the company cafeteria as usual, the topic of next year’s April Fools’ Day came up. Every year on April 1st, Google would play “pranks” with various projects to entertain users. As we discussed what to do with Google Maps, I suggested, “Wouldn’t it be fun to make the map look like ‘Dragon Quest’?” I first played Dragon Quest shortly after coming to Japan when my Japanese was still poor, playing with the help of friends. I thought people would be surprised if Google Maps suddenly looked like the Famicom version of Dragon Quest. After dinner, instead of going home, I returned to my desk and started creating a “demo” to give form to this idea. “Demo” is short for “demonstration,” like a prototype made to show an idea to others. At Google, there was a culture that valued demos so much that there was a saying like “seeing once is worth hearing a hundred times.” I programmed for about three hours and created a simple demo that ran in a browser. This demo used image processing techniques to replace the blue parts of the map with Dragon Quest sea images, the green parts with trees, and the yellow parts with roads—it was simple but looked quite authentic.

The next day, I showed this demo to my colleagues who came to the office. Their reaction exceeded my expectations; everyone was delighted. Ken-san (Kentaro Tokusei), who was my boss’s boss at the time, also liked this idea and showed the demo to Brian McClendon, who was the head of Google Maps, and secured his approval. My direct supervisor, Goto-san (Masamichi Goto), also allowed me to proceed with this as a 20% project.

I’m not sure if it still exists, but when I joined, Google had a 20% rule that allowed employees to use 20% of their working hours on projects outside their main job. Projects using this time were called 20% projects, and several of Google’s representative services, including Gmail, started as 20% projects. This is how the Dragon Quest Map project began.

No matter how interesting the project was, we couldn’t use Dragon Quest images without permission. We naturally needed approval from the rights holders. The marketing representative Negoro-san and business development representative Kawamura-san connected us with representatives from Square Enix, which owned the rights to Dragon Quest, and arranged for us to show them the demo. The Square Enix representatives who saw the demo were very pleased and gave us comments and ideas such as “It would be fun if there were monsters too” and “Which generation of Dragon Quest would be best?” Through this connection, I later had the opportunity to meet Yuji Horii, the creator of Dragon Quest.

While a demo could be created in a few hours, turning it into a real service required much more time. I proceeded with development with help from Iwasaki-san, my senior from university days, and Abe-san, who had looked after me during my internship. I went on a two-week business trip to Seattle, where the team responsible for the map display was located, and received their cooperation as well.

Unfortunately, I cannot record the technical details here, but it’s a truly enjoyable memory that Iwasaki-san and I named an algorithm we devised to make the map look 8-bit as “Tatsuo-Iwasaki-ham,” in reference to “Bresenham’s Algorithm,” a classic algorithm for drawing lines on computers thought up by Jack Bresenham in the 1960s.

Dogfooding

In the IT industry, the practice of releasing a pre-completion product internally for testing is called “dogfooding.” This term originated at Microsoft and means “eat your own dog food before feeding it to dogs”—in other words, try the product yourself before letting others use it. Once “8-bit Maps” (the American name for the Dragon Quest Map project) was functioning to some extent, we began dogfooding. The internal response was tremendous, and my mailbox was quickly flooded with feedback and bug reports. Among the feedback was a request to see “8-bit style landmarks.” I thought this was interesting. At that point, the terrain in “8-bit Maps” had a Dragon Quest 8-bit style, but when zoomed in, it became a monotone of forests or mountains, which wasn’t very interesting. I thought that if landmarks like Tokyo Tower, the Egyptian Pyramids, London’s Big Ben, or India’s Taj Mahal appeared on the map in Dragon Quest style, users would surely search around for various landmarks. The main design was being helped by a designer named Alex in America who was using his 20% time, but he alone couldn’t possibly manage to design all the landmarks in time. So, I sought help from the internal designer mailing list. More than 100 designers responded to my call and each designed various landmarks as they saw fit. That was good so far, but when I looked at the finished products, most lacked unity and an “8-bit feel.” The graphics of the Famicom era, also called pixel art, have a distinctive style. This style was devised to display the best possible graphics within the limitations of the Famicom’s capabilities. To recreate this 8-bit feel on Google Maps running on a computer without the performance limitations of the Famicom, we needed to artificially impose restrictions on how the images were drawn. Having built a Famicom before, I had assumed that everyone understood how to draw these images and had failed to communicate this to the designers. When I explained the situation to Madoka-san (Madoka Katayama), a designer who sat nearby, she volunteered to create design guidelines. We distributed the guidelines Madoka-san created to the designers helping with the project and asked them to redesign the landmarks. This is how the Dragon Quest Map finally gained 8-bit style landmarks. Among the designers who created landmarks was Kawashima-san (Yuji Kawashima), who would later invite me to Niantic. Kawashima-san drew a panda icon, which became the icon for all zoos around the world where pandas are present.

Promo Video

While advancing product development, we also discussed promotion with the marketing team. At this time, Negoro-san from the marketing team introduced me to Kento Suga-san, who would later become Niantic’s Asia Regional Marketing Manager. Suga-san was a huge game enthusiast and agreed to create a promo video. Since “8-bit Maps” was an April Fools’ joke, the promo video needed to be funny and silly. After extensive discussions with Negoro-san, Suga-san, and Motoyama-san, who was then a creative director at Hakuhodo, we decided on the following content:

“At Google, we have been developing Google Maps for a wide range of devices to provide services to more people. Today, we are announcing ‘Google Maps 8-bit,’ which can be used on the Family Computer (Famicom), which has sold over 60 million units worldwide. This will be the 1,054th software title for the Famicom, the first in 18 years.”

This promo video¹ was viewed 3 million times in one day and received numerous awards. My English was still halting at that time, so we had to reshoot many times. The script was co-written with Taj, the product manager. Negoro-san, Suga-san, and Motoyama-san, with whom I created this video, would go on to create April Fools’ videos together every year thereafter. Even after Niantic became independent from Google, I worked with Suga-san and Motoyama-san to create the launch video for “Pokémon GO.”

Leadership

In April 2012, exactly one year after joining Google, we launched “Google Maps 8-bit.” The night before, my supervisors Goto-san and Ken-san came to the company to prepare. We set up screens to monitor server access and finally reached midnight. The time had finally come to deliver the product, which we had created over two months with the help of many people, to users around the world. With a prayerful feeling, I pressed the launch button. Within a few minutes, server access began to draw a gradual upward curve. Comments started appearing on Twitter about how Google Maps was becoming something extraordinary. After confirming that the product was working without issues, I published articles with the signature “Tatsuo Nomura, Google Maps Software Engineer” on both the English² and Japanese³ versions of the official Google blog. The blog post, co-written with product manager Taj, included the joke about Google Maps supporting the Famicom, as well as a typical April Fools’ comment: “We are also rushing the development of a Game Boy version for mobile devices.” When the official Google Twitter account posted a link to the blog article, the information spread instantly, and the graph showing server traffic continued to rise steadily.

Google Maps

8-bit

As morning came, I felt very proud seeing “Google Maps 8-bit” becoming a topic of conversation in television reports, internet media, and everywhere else. This wasn’t limited to Japan; it was reported by media all over the world.

Since Google doesn’t have a seniority system, even though I was just a new graduate in my first year of employment, I was able to lead a project that had a global impact. I wasn’t in a position to directly give work orders to anyone, so to make the project successful, I had to capture people’s interest, persuade them, and get their help. I sometimes needed to give directions to those helping me or reject their opinions. Through this project, I learned firsthand how to get people to help willingly without offending them. I later learned that this is called “Leading by influence” in English, meaning to lead through influence rather than commands, and it’s an important leadership skill.

Looking back now, “8-bit Maps” was truly an enjoyable project. After the project ended, Madoka-san and I made T-shirts and distributed them to everyone who had cooperated. I was once again grateful to the many people who collaborated on the project and to Google’s environment that allowed us to seriously work on such joke projects.

For Those Aspiring to Be Actors

About an hour’s drive south from San Francisco, California, along Route 101, lies a region centered around Santa Clara County that has become a major hub for IT companies. This area is known as “Silicon Valley.” It includes the cities of San Mateo, Redwood City, Palo Alto, Mountain View, Cupertino, Santa Clara, and San Jose, while San Francisco itself is generally not included in Silicon Valley. However, there are many technology companies and startups in San Francisco City, and from a corporate culture perspective, it can be considered the same as Silicon Valley. The term “Silicon Valley” is said to have first appeared in a 1971 series called “Silicon Valley USA” by journalist Don Hoefler. Nearly half a century later, in 2017, countless global companies are lined up in and around San Francisco and Silicon Valley: Apple, Adobe Systems, Advanced Micro Devices, eBay, Intel, Uber, Airbnb, NVIDIA, Oracle, Google, Salesforce, Cisco, Twitter, Tesla Motors, Facebook, and many more. It is truly the Mecca of the technology industry.

Long before it was called Silicon Valley, William Hewlett and David Packard founded Hewlett-Packard in a garage in Palo Alto in 1939, which is said to be the beginning of Silicon Valley. Hewlett-Packard’s first product, the HP200A, was used in Walt Disney’s film “Fantasia.” Hewlett-Packard, founded by two young men in a garage, continued to grow, generating over $50 billion in annual sales by the 1950s, and exceeding $90 billion in annual sales by 2007, reigning as the world’s most valuable IT company until overtaken by Apple in 2013⁴. Apple, too, was founded by two young men in a Silicon Valley garage. In 1976, Steve Wozniak⁵, who had left Hewlett-Packard, and Steve Jobs, who had dropped out of college, formed the Apple Computer Company Partnership, the predecessor to Apple⁶. Ronald Wayne was also part of this agreement, but 12 days later, he sold his 10% stake to Steve Jobs for $500 and left the agreement. As of June 2017, 10% of Apple’s shares are worth $80 billion (about 9 trillion yen). Apple has released innovative products such as the Apple II, the world’s first mass-produced personal computer for individuals, along with the iPod, iPhone, and iPad. As of 2017, its market capitalization has reached $800 billion (about 90 trillion yen), making it the world’s most valuable company⁷. Google⁸, which follows Apple in market capitalization, was also founded by just two young men. In 1998, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, who were then doctoral students at Stanford University, founded Google in a garage in Menlo Park, part of Silicon Valley. Page and Brin developed a revolutionary search service that was completely different from the mainstream directory services, which were user-registration-based search services. This new search service, called Google Search, traced hyperlinks on websites, assigned scores to each website, and utilized them for searches. When users entered keywords, they could instantly access the information they wanted, with websites displayed in order of relevance.

If aspiring actors dream of or aim for Hollywood, then Silicon Valley is the Hollywood for software engineers. Silicon Valley, which has created numerous legends and continues to be at the cutting edge of the times, is a place that every software engineer dreams of at least once. In August 2012, some time after the launch of “Google Maps 8-bit,” I decided to transfer to Silicon Valley, where Google’s headquarters is located. At Google, internal transfers were relatively free, and you could go anywhere as long as you found a place that would accept you. I emailed a manager of the headquarters team that was working on the mobile version of Google Maps, expressing my desire to join them. I received agreement from that manager, whom I had known before, in two replies, and my transfer to headquarters was decided without any interviews.