Kotaku editor Brian Ashcraft does his thing from across the big pond over in Japan. In fact, he does it from the city of Osaka, which just happens to be where Castle Capcom is located. This makes Ben Judd, who is in Japan, producing games, a mere stone’s throw away and naturally a great interview candidate, and so Kotaku did exactly that. Brian has just posted on Kotaku said exclusive interview where Ben discloses more about how he got started in the industry and ended up at the console game development mecca known as Japan, how Bionic Commando went from a possible 2D portable title to a next-gen AAA experience, working with both Japanese and Swedish developers at the same time, and having hot dogs hanging off your arm…

After graduation, he got a job at an import video game shop and kept studying Japanese full speed. He measured his progress by his ability to understand Final Fantasy games in their native lingo. “When I got Final Fantasy VII and Cloud showed up in a bath with other men,” Judd remember, “I had no clue what was going on.” By the time he got to FFIX , he could completely understand 98 percent of the game in Japanese. But Judd knew that if he was ever going to use his language skills, he need to get it damn close to perfect – as perfect as it was going to be for a non-native speaker. Making the trip out to Japan again, he got a job teaching English. His free time was spent honing his language skills. “Then about that time, there was a death in the family,” Judd says. “Here I was whiling away my time in Japan. I needed to get back to States.” Capcom USA had a job opening, and Judd applied. Translation tests, interview-after-interview and teleconferences in Tokyo followed. Judd was hired. And after a stint working in the American office, he was back in Japan.

Check out the whole feature on Kotaku .