Jesse Venbrux on Mr. Karoshi

Recently I managed to hunt down Jesse Venbrux, the man responsible for releasing his hit indie PC game Mr. Karoshi, onto the iOS market place.  I asked him for an interview and here is the result:

Mr. Karoshi is a very novel idea.  Where did you get your inspiration?  


I try and come up with original ideas, so one part of the story is that I am just always looking for them. But I believe at the time I read about a game called "5 minutes to kill yourself" and played a super difficult platformer called I Wanna Be The Guy. In that last game I noticed how getting killed was kind of satisfactory (the visuals and sound) and in my head these different ideas got connected to form Karoshi.

Why did you start making games?

I've always been making things, drawing pictures, writing stories so the question for me is "why do I make stuff?". My parent are artists so it's just the kind of person I am. I enjoy coming up with something that didn't exist before, I think that's pretty amazing.


How did you get into making apps? 

The company behind Game Maker asked me to make a PSP game, as they were working on some universal converter. Later they switched to focus on iOS and Android. As such Karoshi was originally designed for PSP but came out on iOS and Android first. In hindsight I am happy with how the game turned out, since I was worried the controls wouldn't translate well. However I wish I had put some more time in the touch screen version to make more use of the devices specific features for clever puzzles. Who knows, perhaps in the future.

You have quite a large selections of free games on your site, do you think you will release any more on the iOS format?

I might release something in the future but probably not any of my old games. Most of them don't fit the touch screen devices well. Currently I am working for a company so don't have much time unfortunately to dedicate to personal projects.

All of your games that I have played so far involve death and most are fairly nightmarish in their atmosphere.  Why do you like making games in this fashion?


I have a dark sense of humour. Also, I want people to feel something when they play my games. Maybe I want them to feel something I felt (we all want to share our feelings right?). There's some morbid feeling about death which I think I was able to express with gameplay. I hope I'll be able to express (I should say: make people feel) more and different feelings with my work.

I don't have any bad experience with death or thoughts of suicide, and up till Karoshi never made games or other things about death so I'm not sure what happened but it must have something to do with my personality.

PixelJunk Monsters

Finally what do you have planned next?

I'm currently working on PixelJunk Monsters for social networks at a company called Q-Games. PixelJunk Monsters is a cute tower defense game currently available on the PlayStation Network.In the future I may do mobile again or more games on social networks or a combination. But I'm sure I'll keep making lots of games!

To check out more games by Jesse Venbrux check out his site here