Today we’d like to introduce you to Kevin Kim.
Hi Kevin, thanks for joining us today. We’d love for you to start by introducing yourself.
I graduated from Otis College of Art and Design with a Department of Digital Media at Los Angeles in 2004. After that, I had five years of experience in the motion graphics field, 2 years in CG animation and five years in film VFX. In 2012, my team won an Oscar and an Emmy award for the film Hugo (directed by Martin Scorsese) and Game of Throne. Now I have a variety of media careers and have been working in the game industry for 7 years.
In 2014, I worked at a visual effects studio in Melbourne, Australia. I rented an ocean-view apartment on St. Kilda Pier. I commuted to work on the used bicycle offered by the studio. One night on my way back home, I stopped my bike by the pier to sit on the rock to catch my breath and watch the night sea. I loved the cool breeze and the crashing of the dark waves, but soon my mind flooded with worries of my future. I was not so young (late thirties), divorced, and far from home (Los Angeles), with no savings and no plans for the future.
Stopping by the pier for rest became my daily post-work routine. About a month later, all the unanswerable worries started to fade away, and fond memories emerged. The memories of my mother’s cooking, family vacations, childhood friends and my original dream of making video games came to my mind. I rediscovered my forgotten passion for video games, the reason I went to art school in the first place (11 years ago at that time). This small spark grew bigger and bigger until the thought of creating games dominated my mind, so I decided to challenge myself one more time before it was too late.
When I came back to LA, I couldn’t start my gaming career right away because I didn’t have any experience working in games. At that time, I met up with my friend and talked to him about my game ideas. When he asked to see my ideas, I prepared hard for a month and a half and presented my first game deck to three acquaintances for two hours. One of the acquaintances is a friend who lived far from me and is notorious for his stoicism, but he response, “This was worth driving 2 hours on my day off.”
Ah! Success! In that way, three guys who do not have any game developing experience got together and started making a game. That was the start of the Team Brave Turtles seven years ago.
A few weeks later, at the first team meeting, the same friend/team member showed me a rough prototype of the very same game that I had presented earlier. I was completely blown away! The prototype of the game that had previously only existed in my imagination was now before my eyes! I couldn’t sleep that night as excitement kept slumber at bay. It was the moment when the spark, the embers in Melbourne, was rekindled. Then I decided. Let’s do something so exciting that I can not sleep. Someday I will open my own game studio!
As the team grew little by little, my team needed a place to work. Then, one of the team members told me that he was remodeling his garage. So, I subsidized the remodeling and turned it into a workplace for our team. At this point, I got a job as a Senior VFX Artist at Respawn Entertainment, so I developed AAA games during the day and worked on our indie game at night and on weekends.
When I started working at a game company in earnest, the gaming network opened up, and from then on, I met outstanding talents in the game industry and brought them to our team one by one. We met every two weeks on a Thursday night at 8 o’clock in the workplace, whether it rained or snowed, to eat pizza and continue to develop our games.
Then the pandemic happened. The in-person meetings moved online, and everyone acculturated to the new way of communicating. When I imagined starting a business, I always thought that finding an office and having equipment and utilities would be a big burden, but that worry dissipated as we found ways to work together apart. And at that point, the best team has been created with great skill sets, experiences, and good personalities. The team that can develop A to Z to ship the solid games. After 6 years of preparation, I decided to take a chance. In January 2021, I left the company and started BraveTurtles Inc.
Alright, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
Everyone is talking about the Metaverse, and high-tech jargon such as NFT, VR and decentralized are thrown around. However, in the end, two most important things are the avatars created by the users and the content that these users will enjoy. What if there is nothing to enjoy at the amusement park? Would you like to go? The metaverse pursued by Brave Turtles is to fill the metaverse with fun rides. The metaverse as an amusement park! We the Brave Turtles are positioned to fill this amusement park with the best rides!
What do Metaverse users like and why? One of key aspects of the metaverse is the idea of creating yourself and as an extension, your world, whether it’s your avatar, your home or your wardrobe.
Here comes RunwayZ, the fashion show interactive content to be released in this November provides a participatory experience of becoming a designer and dressing an avatar model, rather than simply looking at it from a viewer’s point of view, and has a survival element that selects the winner through voting. A feature of our content is that it brings a reality show element that is popular among teens and 20-somethings and allows you to decorate your avatar from head to toe in a variety of ways using more than 4 million fashion items. It is designed to share experiences and have fun. In addition, I think it is a unique fashion metaverse work that allows you to enjoy shopping naturally in this process.
That the Brave Turtles were able to create all this in six months makes me really proud of how well we work as a team. What started as a hobby, passion project by like-minded acquaintances, has grown to be a game that makes its mark on the metaverse, to be enjoyed by an audience larger than we could have ever dreamed. First and foremost, our priority is the player and their experience interacting with our game.
I believe the metaverse will be the mode of communication and socializing in the future, and I am thankful the Brave Turtles will be a part of it from the ground up.
Alright, so let’s switch gears a bit and talk business. What should we know?
Brave Turtles Inc.
Our mission explains about our core of the business. “WE MAKE GOOD GAMES TOGETHER – Stylish, Unique, Friendly.”
We are aiming to be a No.1 Metaverse gaming contents developer. We are about to launch our first interactive world on ZEPETO.
Many companies have talented members. We have talented members who genuinely care about one another and love working together.
We are finally ready to launch our first metaverse content soon.
Please take part in the most exciting fashion multiplayer battle “RUNWAY Z”! It is available only on ZEPETO.
RUNWAY Z reached over 1,000,000 visits just in a week. Compared to other worlds, it’s an incredible user base and breaking records in history!
We’d love to hear about any fond memories you have from when you were growing up?
I moved to the United States from South Korea in 1992, my life shifted as a new immigrant student in Chatsworth, California. I started over in every way. The language barrier was difficult. The cultural difference was jarring. In the midst of this tumultuous time, I met my first art teacher, Marlene Kasahara.
The first class was a watercolor class, and the student accidentally spilled water while sharing the desk. Mrs. Karahara saw it and said to me, “Watch Out Kevin!” I didn’t understand what it meant because I didn’t speak English at the time. “Watch~ Out??” see something outside? Do I need to watch outside of the class window? Seeing the bewilderment on my face, Mrs. Karahara smiled and kindly wiped the water with a paper towel.
After this, I really fell in love with Mrs. Kasahara’s classes and with art. I soon started showing off my talent in art, and Mrs. Karahara submitted my drawings to the local Rotary Club competitions. So, for the first time in my life, I won an award. I still vividly remember that moment. My name was called, and a group of well-dressed people applauded while I received the award. Even though many years have passed, the joy and satisfaction remain vividly in my mind.
Throughout high school, I always took Mrs. Kasahara’s art classes. And I went to Otis College of Art and Design, after I graduated, I built an 18-year career as an artist and now am the CEO of a game startup. In retrospect, Mrs. Kasahara opened this path for me. I would like to express my deep gratitude to Mrs. Kasahara.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.braveturtles.com/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/runway_z_/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/brave.turtles
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@runway_z
- Other: https://www.tiktok.com/@runway_z
Image Credits
personal pictures by Jordan Lamarre-Wan
