A video game company built in Wausau
Chris Cantero is about to launch his first video game, High Fructose, following an impressive career in video games and animation
Chris Cantero originally wanted to be an Air Force pilot. He attended Texas A&M on an Air Force scholarship and set himself on track toward the goal of flying the big planes.
But two years into the program, his advisor had some bad news for him. Without perfect eyesight, he wouldn’t be able to become a pilot.
That came from a change in the rules. Many probably remember that perfect or near-perfect eyesight as being a requirement for becoming a pilot. But more recently, the Air Force allowed prospective pilots to get a surgery called PRK to correct their eyesight.
But that changed, and the old rule of needing perfect or near-perfect eyesight was in play again. Cantero wouldn’t be able to become a pilot.
While that derailed Cantero’s dreams of becoming a pilot, it led to another career that many dream of: working for some of the hottest video games and films that are household names.
Cantero moved to Rib Mountain a year ago and is about to launch the first game from his new game studio Chazak Games, called High Fructose. In the game, you are a ninja who traverses an arena slashing fruit. See the trailer below:
The game, which Cantero is soon to launch a Kickstarter for, comes on the heels of a career spent in the animation and game industry. Cantero worked on movies including the Planet of the Apes series, game companies including Id Software, and even game engine Unity (a game engine is essentially the backbone of a game, and provides developers a set of tools which helps them avoid from starting from scratch every time they make a game).
Unity encourages its employees to develop their own projects as well as work for them, and High Fructose was born from that.
But part of Cantero’s strategy was to move somewhere with an affordable cost of living and his wife grew up in the Merrill area. Cantero is among the elusive young professional and entrepreneur class that Wausau is trying to attract.
That’s the idea with the Foundry on Third project, a new mixed-use building going up on the former Wausau Center mall site. Area business leaders argue that a lack of housing options make attracting young talent to the area challenging.
Cantero has a family with four kids and bought a house here in Rib Mountain — but that was also a challenge, with the area’s housing in short supply and high demand since 2016.
Some of the idea, area leaders say, is that introducing more housing of any kind — even high-end apartments — will increase supply while lowering prices. There are some who push back on that idea, such as Scott Alexander, who points out that places with the most housing seem to also have the highest prices.
But at the end of the day, people need housing. And Wausau leaders are counting on a strategy of more housing working.
A life in animation and video games
Life rarely follows a linear path — after he learned he could no longer be a fighter pilot, Cantero focused on architecture at Texas A&M — that led to art school to focus more on animation (which is a big part of architecture these days), then to landing a job in animation.
Cantero worked on some projects you’d have heard of, such as the Planet of the Apes series. He made commercials, including one for Chick-Fil-A. But when he saw a chance to work at a video game studio, something he dreamed of as a kid, he took the chance. He was hired at High Moon Studios in San Diego.
The environment was surprisingly relaxed, despite the dreadful stories of madness at video game companies. Cantero said he worked normal 40 hour weeks, though more during crunch time. There were things such as two-hour Ultimate Frisbee breaks. For them he worked on a Transformers video game and then a Deadpool game (before the Ryan Reynolds movie came out).
But after Deadpool, the studio laid off half the staff. Cantero said he saw it coming and had already been applying for jobs. While in California he and his wife had their first child and houses in California looked, well, not exactly affordable. So they moved to Texas.
He briefly worked in architecture before finding his way back into video games, working remotely on Call of Duty for a company based in Madison called Raven Software.
From there, Cantero found himself working for the legendary Id Software (founded by John Carmack and John Romero, creators of the groundbreaking video game Doom). Then he went to work for Unity, a game engine that powers video games. (Game engines handle a lot of the basic mechanics of a game, allowing the developers to focus on the creative parts of the game instead).
At Unity, Cantero says, they were encouraged to work on their own projects, and that’s what he’s been doing. He started working on two games — one that’s similar to a Legend of Zelda-style game. And one that’s a fast-paced slasher, High Fructose, which is about to launch on Kickstarter.
Cantero and his family, which now includes four kids, decided to move to Wausau a year ago. His wife is from Merrill originally, which is what put the Wausau area on their radar in the first place.
“I love Wausau,” Cantero says. "I've always lived in the south my whole life. I love the seasons here. And I'm sure people will complain about the snow here, but actually I like the snow a lot. I got four kids, so I have a blast playing in the snow with my kids, sledding and building snowmen.”
Attracting talent
People such as Cantero are the kind of young professionals Greater Wausau Chamber President Dave Eckmann says he and other community leaders are hoping to attract to the area.
“Today’s entrepreneurs require a different set of resources,” Eckmann says. He met with Cantero to discuss his business and of course didn’t need an actual building; Cantero has a home studio and others who help on the game do so remotely. He did more need talent, and the money to help pay that talent. Eckmann helped connect him with UWSP’s IT department for a potential connection to some talent in the field. He sees the Chamber’s role as also helping Cantero out with investors to help pay that talent he hires.
It’s also the idea behind the Powerhouse — a project that looks to transform the former WPS power building behind the Chamber’s officers into a hub for coworking, technology and fostering entrepreneurship.
The idea is to not only foster entrepreneurship and teach new skills, but to serve as a hub for collaboration. Eckmann says it’s about telling the stories of local entrepreneurs and building an ecosystem that Wausau doesn’t have right now. He says Green Bay, Eau Claire, Milwaukee and other cities have that ecosystem. Not Wausau. But he says that’s about to change.
The Chamber has a lease on the building and plans to transform it into the new building once the necessary funds can be raised.
That runs parallel with other efforts to make the area more marketable to young professionals and entrepreneurs. That includes the Chamber’s promotion of Ironbull and other outdoor recreation, including the revamp of the Rib Mountain master plan. That’s all meant to improve placemaking.
Will it work?
On a recent trip with a family member, an interesting discussion arose. We realized whenever we talk to people around the state about Wausau, we usually get some variation of “Oh, I usually drive past Wausau on the way to [Chicago, Minneapolis, Milwaukee, Madison, etc.]” More rare is someone who actually stops. (Though a pair of young gals I met up north at the WinMann Trails raved about Red Eye Brewing Co. when I mentioned I was from Wausau.)
That’s the big challenge. And it’s not one Wausau is winning. As The Wausonian mentioned before, Wausau’s population has been shrinking lately.
That applies not only to the larger metro, as highlighted above, but to the city itself. Wausau briefly crossed the 40,000 threshold in 2020 but has been steadily decreasing every year since.
That comes as several projects that would add more housing — something area leaders say is crucial to attracting and retaining a new workforce — have stalled or stagnated. The first mixed-use building on the former Wausau Center mall site has finally broke ground and is now under construction. Several projects in the RiverLife area have fallen through, and only one apartment project in the area’s ten-year life have come through so far. Others such as Bantr have seen success on the private market.
But no one has a great answer yet as to what kinds of things would actually attract someone to the area. Eckmann says it means the area needs to step up its marketing.
A frequent complaint of new transplants that I hear is that it’s hard to break into the social circles in Wausau. People struggle to make new friends and often say many seem to already have their social circles set and aren’t interested in letting in new people.
Couple that with the absolute collapse of young professional groups in the area. While in the late 2010s, those groups were flourishing, today they’ve become a distant memory.
Building more social groups might be a key to keeping people around when they do land here. One such group is the Central Wisconsin Outdoor Adventure group, which is a free group on Facebook with numerous events every week that anyone can join.
The launch
High-Fructose is set to launch on Kickstarter later this month. The game is already gaining momentum on Steam wishlists (an important early metric for a game to launch) and it’s starting to get attention from influencers.
Cantero says the game was in part inspired by the game Fruit Ninja, particularly the mechanics of slashing fruit. The game has players traversing a flat platform in first-person shooter style, slashing at fruit enemies and collecting points. The action is colorful and furious, and looks like a lot of fun.
You can can check it out yourself by watching the video up above or head on over to the main High Fructose page for more.
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What does that guy have against fruit