Neko Ghost, Jump! Lead Victor Burgos on His Experience as a Military Vet Turned Game Dev
When Victor Burgos founded Burgos Games, the indie studio developing Neko Ghost, Jump!, the 12-year Marine Corps veteran thought he could lead his team like a Parris Island boot camp. “My initial thinking was, oh, I’ll just run them like I did as a sergeant in the Marine Corps. These guys are like my PFCs, my privates,” Burgos said. “It does not work like that.”
A longtime gamer, Burgos has learned a lot about what it takes to be a leader in the games industry since he formed his namesake studio in 2019. Under his watch, Burgos Games is in the late stages of development for Neko Ghost, Jump!, its first major foray onto the indie game scene. The cat-themed puzzle platformer, currently available for Early Access on Steam and on the Epic Games Store, is aimed at gamers of all stripes, from speedrunners to combat aficionados. Game Rant talked with Burgos about his experience transitioning from the military to game development and how that informed his studio’s work.
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Burgos has always been interested in video games and programming, he said. A child of the 1980s, he grew up playing on his Atari 2600 during what he called “the big boom of modern-day video games.” By the time he graduated from high school, Burgos was on his way to pursuing a computer science degree at the University of Central Florida. “But then, 9/11 happened.”
After the 2001 terrorist attacks, Burgos enlisted in the Marine Corps. Until 2005 or so, he was stationed at Marine Corps Air Station Iwakuni on mainland Japan as an aviation ordnance systems technician. Living in Japan was “like karma,” Burgos said — the country’s video game culture, which at the time was centered around arcades, made him
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