About

Born in Kyoto, Japan, Mitochondria began designing games in elementary school -- driven not by technology, but by a single question: what actually makes an experience move people. That question refused to stay inside any one discipline. They went on to release indie titles on the Apple App Store, train in Animation Dance -- a physical practice of mimicking NPC motion and digital glitch phenomena rooted in street culture -- and conduct XR research on human visual perception at Osaka University's Graduate School of Information Science. Each field offered a partial answer. None offered a complete one. Their debut work PlayableHuman -- developed entirely solo, without institutional funding or laboratory support -- won the Grand Prix and two additional awards at IVRC 2025, Japan's premier interactive VR contest. Now based in Tokyo, Mitochondria continues to pursue the fusion of dance, street culture, and emerging technology. Their vision is to redesign reality itself as a game -- and within that game, to treat the human body as the ultimate controller. Just as a player reaches for a gamepad, we reach for our bodies to navigate a world built from invisible rules, power structures, and operating systems we never agreed to install. Mitochondria's work asks what it would feel like to become aware of those controls -- and what it means to resist them. The goal is not to critique the real, but to design a better one as a game. They are still asking the exact same question they started with. Only the scale of the answer has changed.