Christophe Galati describes himself as a game designer, developer and pixel artist. Born in 1994, he discovered video games, and especially the Game Boy, thanks to one of his older brothers. An enthusiastic user of the RPG Maker software, he learned how to build little games before enrolling in the Isart Digital school of video games and animation in Paris after completing his secondary studies.

There he participated in “game jams”, hackathons dedicated to creating video games. Four years later he developed a demo version of the game that would make his name, based on an iconic character: an octopus named Tako.

In a world where octopuses and humans are at war, Tako is an octopus who doesn’t want to fight. His weapons and purpose? Squirting ink to paralyse his enemies and travelling across the human world to prevent war.

Born in a restaurant on Rue Saint-Anne in Paris over takoyaki (a Japanese speciality from Osaka made from batter and octopus), Christophe Galati’s flagship game Save me Mr Tako: Tasukete Tako-San pays tribute to the 8-bit look of the Game Boy, an aesthetic associated with “first generation” consoles and computers, recognisable particularly by its large pixels.

Featuring music composed by Marc-Antoine Archier, the game depicts a world which initially appears to be binary, where good and evil are waging a merciless war, before the player discovers more subtle power relations.

Selected at the Tokyo Game Show in 2016, there Christophe Galati presented an improved version of his Tako demo game to American game publisher Nicalis. While in the process of signing his publishing contract, he was awarded a residency at the Villa Kujoyama in Japan in 2019.

This made him one of the first video game creators to take part in an artistic residency programme. After the release and success of Save me Mr. Tako, he is developing a new 16-bit game (twice as powerful as 8-bit), this time paying tribute to the aesthetic of the Super Nintendo and the Game Boy Advance, descendants of the Game Boy.