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Kaizen: A Factory Story, an upcoming video game described on Steam as "an open-ended puzzle automation game," is essentially a game about manufacturing lines. More specifically, manufacturing lines in '80s Japan. You make things that make things, which is very much in line with previous games from developer Zachtronics – and now, Coincidence, a new team made up of the original Zachtronics team.
"I just really like it? I don't know," admits Zach Barth, creative director on Kaizen and the "Zach" formerly of Zachtronics, when asked why he keeps making games about production lines and the like earlier this year at GDC 2025. "I do most of the game design on most of our games, and I can't design any type of game, right? There's some things that I kind of understand – there's a lot of games I don't understand at all. But I think that games about programming and production and things like that, I feel like I've a special understanding of."
First call
The team behind Zachtronics disbanded in late 2022 after releasing one final game, Last Call BBS. Coincidence is, by design, much less of a traditional company. Barth was ostensibly in charge at Zachtronics, but the new business is much more flexible and is, according to Barth, set up in such a way that nobody's really in charge and they all work on whatever projects they want. And what they want, first up, is Kaizen.
"Kaizen is a game where you play as a Japanese American who goes to Japan to work in Japanese business right at the peak of the Japanese bubble era in the late '80s," says Matthew Seiji Burns, who wrote Kaizen's story and did the music, "right when Japan is making all of its most iconic products, the ones that we remember and kind of idolize a little bit, like the Sony Walkman, or the Nintendo Game Boy."
"Obviously we don't have those actual products, like in the game," adds Burns. "We didn't license all that. But the idea is just to kind of talk a little bit about that point in history, why those products are so memorable."
"A lot of the games we've made are about making things," adds Barth. "And so you need a setting where people make stuff, right? And so that's the similarity between '80s Japan and then – I guess Shenzhen I/O takes place in the future, but it's based on 2013 Shenzhen. These are places with a culture of making things. The characters in the game talk about making things."
The gap between Zachtronics and Coincidence is actually much slimmer than it might first appear. According to Barth, the team decided to wrap things up at least in part because Barth was feeling burnt out on making games, and he'd decided to try his hand at teaching. But thanks to COVID-related complications, Last Call BBS ended up taking far longer than anticipated to complete, and by the time it was released, Barth had already spent a year teaching – and finding out that, actually, he didn't want to do that.
"Turns out you don't need to get a teaching license to teach computer science; they'll just let anybody in," jokes Barth about his stint teaching computer science, though it's not entirely a joke. He ultimately didn't learn anything by being a teacher that will help him as a game designer – or, at least, he doesn't think so.
"I'm just not a teacher," he notes. "I learned a lot, but I don't know how much of it is transferable. Much like teaching, none of it transfers. It's just hopeless."
But with teaching behind him, Barth is fully immersed in the making of games once again. How immersed? While Kaizen: A Factory Story is about to release, Barth told me in March that a second game he was working on was completely done save for art, and he was already starting on a third.
"I think I have to do it until I die," admits Barth when I ask how long he intends to keep making games. "I don't think I have a choice. I mean, like, until I retire, and I don't even, like, see that happening. So I think it's, yeah, make games and die. That's my plan."
Kaizen: A Factory Story is set to release for PC via Steam on July 14, 2025. If you can't wait, be sure to check out our ranking of the best PC games.
