Zander Netherbrand Sinks to 800 Yen in Restory, Then Cleans His Way Out of Debt

FIRST STAGE PRODUCTION — Zander Netherbrand of FIRST STAGE PRODUCTION ran his shop into the red in the cozy repair game Restory: Chill Electronics Repairs on Friday. After spending nearly all his money on a license and parts, he was down to about 800 yen when rent, internet and electricity bills all came due on the same in-game day.

In the game he runs a small electronics repair shop, taking in handhelds, brick phones, a cassette player and a digital pet and cleaning or fixing each one. He stripped spares from broken devices, bought a soldering iron, and noticed that cartridge slots on the Atari-style consoles kept turning out to be the part that had failed. At one point he assembled a whole console from leftover pieces, with a sale price of 8,000 yen. The shop’s neighbors kept him busy too: an electrician who traded wiring work for a repair, and a visitor from a crime family who collected 1,000 yen a week in protection money. He paid it.

“Somehow I managed to turn a cozy repair game into me yelling that the mob were going to break my legs.” — Zander Netherbrand, closing the stream

The squeeze came after he bought a license for a job that turned out to need more parts than he could afford. When the three bills hit together, he accepted an 8,000-yen cleaning job to cover them, joked that a debt collector he called Tony-sama would break his kneecaps, and begged for more time as he put an Atari back together. He then paid out 1,000, 2,000 and 4,000 yen to clear the bills. “That was a little nerve-wracking, not going to lie,” he said. A further brick-game job later pulled him out of the hole.

The game followed roughly three hours of talk. Zander, an incubus persona, greeted his fans, whom he calls jellies, by joking about shell casings on the floor after a run of gifted memberships that he called “jelly sniping.” Over the evening he took up whether he was sweet or evil, named Bad Deal as his favorite Magic: The Gathering card, ranked masked killers and argued for more scheming, evil omegas in omegaverse fiction. He also answered a viewer’s question about a crush, telling them to shoot their shot because the embarrassment would be outweighed by the joy if it worked out. Viewers sent 24 Super Chats.

Later he looked back on the early days of the company, saying that nobody knew whether it would last and that he came in with no expectations. He said he would not schedule two cozy games back to back again, and promised a dressmaking game next week, with Regency-era looks.