55 Japanese video game designers

Daisuke Amaya , also known by his pseudonym Pixel, is a Japanese indie game developer. He is best known for developing Cave Story , which has been remade into many versions.

Eiji Aonuma is a Japanese video game designer, director, and producer. He works for Nintendo as the project manager of their The Legend of Zelda series. Aonuma is also one of the deputy general managers of Nintendo's Entertainment Planning & Development division, having served that role since 2019.

Katsuya Eguchi is a Japanese game designer, director and producer, most known for being a creator of the Animal Crossing series.

Kenji Eno was a Japanese musician and video game designer. He gained a reputation as a maverick during the mid-1990s for creating unorthodox games like Real Sound and is perhaps best remembered today for his rebellious marketing techniques. Outside of his native home land he was best known for his survival horror video games, the D series. Apart from creating video games, Eno was also a well-regarded electronic musician and he created the scores for several of his games. During his life, Eno founded the video game development companies: EIM and From Yellow to Orange. He also worked in a variety of fields apart from video games and music including the automotive, cellphone, tobacco, and hotel industries. Eno died on February 20, 2013, due to heart failure brought on by hypertension.

Kamui Fujiwara is a Japanese character designer and manga artist. Fujiwara's father was a soldier in the Imperial Japanese Army during World War II. He excelled in mathematics and computer science when in grade school. He graduated from the Kuwasawa Design School. Fujiwara won an honorable mention in 1979 for his debut manga titled Itsu mo no Asa ni in the 18th Tezuka Award along with Toshio Nobe and Tsukasa Hojo, who won the top prize awarded. He was heavily influenced by Katsuhiro Otomo, and a defining feature of his work is the fine attention to detail. His nom de plume "Kamui" has its origins in the name of the Ainu god of creation, Kamuy, and he has used it since high school. He has had stories published in the manga anthology series Petit Apple Pie.

Yukio Futatsugi is a Japanese video game developer. His work includes leading the teams which created Sega Saturn games Panzer Dragoon, Panzer Dragoon II Zwei, and Panzer Dragoon Saga, and Xbox title Phantom Dust. He is the co-founder of video game development company Grounding Inc, developers of Crimson Dragon.

Akihiro Hino is a Japanese video game designer and businessman. Starting his career as a programmer in the 1990s, he later took on roles in writing, design, directing and producing. He founded Level-5 in 1998, where he remains its president and CEO.

Yuji Horii is a Japanese video game designer and scenario writer best known as the creator of the Dragon Quest series of role-playing games, supervising and writing the scenario for Chrono Trigger, as well as the first visual novel adventure game Portopia Serial Murder Case.

Atsushi Inaba is a Japanese video game producer and businessman. He was the former CEO and producer of the Capcom subsidiary Clover Studio, who developed the games Viewtiful Joe, Ōkami, and God Hand. He is currently the head producer at the development division at PlatinumGames and the CEO since 2021, after years being vice-president in the company.

Daisuke Ishiwatari is a South African-Japanese video game developer, illustrator, musician, composer and voice actor. He is best known for creating the 2D fighting game series Guilty Gear. He designed the characters and storyline, and wrote the music. He also provides the in-game voice for the characters Sol Badguy and Order-Sol, as well as Freed Velez in Battle Fantasia.

Tomonobu Itagaki is a Japanese video game designer best known for creating the Dead or Alive series and also reviving the Ninja Gaiden franchise in 2004. Joining Tecmo in 1992, Itagaki produced two video game franchises that were commercial successes and earned him several promotions; he headed Tecmo's development team, Team Ninja, and sat on the executive board. He left the company after 16 years of service, filing a lawsuit against it for withholding bonus pay. His new team at Valhalla Game Studios, comprising other Team Ninja members, worked on a new game, Devil's Third.

Toshio Iwai is a Japanese interactive media and installation artist who has also created a number of commercial video games. In addition he has worked in television, music performance, museum design and digital musical instrument design.

Satoru Iwata was a Japanese businessman, video game programmer, video game designer, and producer. He was the fourth president and chief executive officer (CEO) of Nintendo. He was a major contributor in broadening the appeal of video games by focusing on novel and entertaining games rather than top-of-the-line hardware.

Toru Iwatani is a Japanese video game designer who spent much of his career working for Namco. He is best known as the creator of the arcade game Pac-Man (1980).

Isamu Kamikokuryo is a Japanese video game artist who worked at Square Enix until his resignation on March 31, 2017. He is known for his work on the company's role-playing video game series Final Fantasy, for which he designed locations and characters. Among others, he was involved in the Ivalice Alliance and Fabula Nova Crystallis franchises.

Akitoshi Kawazu is a Japanese game designer, director, producer and writer. After joining Square in 1985, he went on to become a central developer for the first two Final Fantasy titles, then acted as creator and lead developer for the SaGa series.

Hiroki Kikuta is a Japanese video game composer and game designer. His major works are Secret of Mana, Trials of Mana, Soukaigi, and Koudelka, for which he also acted as producer and concept designer. He has composed music for seven other games, and worked as a concept designer in addition to composer for the unreleased MMORPG Chou Bukyo Taisen. He became interested in music at an early age, but earned a degree in Religious Studies, Philosophy, and Cultural Anthropology from Kansai University. He spent the next few years working first as a manga illustrator, then as a composer for anime series, before coming to work for Square in 1991.

Yoshinori Kitase is a Japanese game director and producer working for Square Enix. He is known as the director of Final Fantasy VI, Chrono Trigger, Final Fantasy VII, Final Fantasy VIII and Final Fantasy X, and the producer of the Final Fantasy X and Final Fantasy XIII series. Kitase is a vice president, a member of the board of directors and an executive officer at Square Enix. He is currently the head of Square Enix's Creative Business Unit I and the Final Fantasy series Brand Manager. He was the head of Square Enix's Business Division 1 during its entire existence as well as a Corporate Executive. He is also part of the Final Fantasy Committee that is tasked with keeping the franchise's releases and content consistent.

Yoshiaki Koizumi is a Japanese video game designer, director, and producer, and business executive. He is a senior executive officer at Nintendo, where he is known for his work within their Mario and The Legend of Zelda series.

Hideo Kojima is a Japanese video game designer, director, producer, and writer.

Hideki Konno is a video game director, game designer and producer who works for Nintendo. Since 2015, Konno works as manager at Nintendo EPD, more precisely on the Smart Device Group, the department responsible for production of smartphone games.

Tsutomu Kouno is a Japanese game designer. He was born in Mishima, Shizuoka Prefecture and graduated from College of Engineering of Nihon University. He is best known as designer of video game LocoRoco, but he also contributed to Ico level design.

Jun Maeda is a Japanese writer and co-founder of the visual novel brand Key under Visual Arts. He is considered a pioneer of nakige visual novels, and has mainly contributed as a scenario writer, lyricist, and musical composer for the games the company produces. His style was originally inspired by James Herbert Brennan, and is influenced by Haruki Murakami's novel Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World.

Masaya Matsuura is a Japanese musician and video game designer based in Tokyo, Japan. He was born in Osaka on June 16, 1961, and majored in Industrial Society at Ritsumeikan University. He has worked extensively with music and images, and has been active with the J-Pop band Psy-S. Matsuura has been credited with popularizing the modern rhythm-based music video game at his studio NanaOn-Sha.

Shinji Mikami is a Japanese video game designer, director, and producer. Starting his career at Capcom in 1990, he went on to direct many of the company's biggest titles. He directed the first installment of the Resident Evil series in 1996 and the first installment of the Dino Crisis series in 1999, both being survival horror games. He returned to Resident Evil to direct the remake of the first game in 2002 and the third-person shooter Resident Evil 4 in 2005. In 2006, he directed his final Capcom game God Hand, a beat 'em up action game. Mikami worked at PlatinumGames to direct the third-person shooter Vanquish in 2010. The same year, he founded his own studio Tango Gameworks which has since been acquired by the American company ZeniMax Media. Under his studio, he directed the third-person horror game The Evil Within in 2014. He has also served the roles of producer and executive producer for many games.

Shigeru Miyamoto is a Japanese video game designer, producer and game director at Nintendo, where he serves as one of its representative directors. He is the creator of some of the most acclaimed and best-selling game franchises of all time, including Mario, The Legend of Zelda, Donkey Kong, Star Fox and Pikmin. He is widely regarded as one of the most accomplished and influential designers in the history of video games.

Tetsuya Mizuguchi is a Japanese video game designer, producer, and businessman. Along with ex-Sega developers he is the one of the co-founders of the video game development firm Q Entertainment. He formerly worked for Sega as a producer in their Sega AM3 'arcade machines' team, developing games like Sega Rally Championship and Sega Touring Car Championship, before moving on to become the head of Sega's United Game Artists division, the team responsible for Rez and Space Channel 5. Mizuguchi is known for creating video games that incorporate an emphasis on interactive sound design, evidenced by Rez, Lumines, Child of Eden, and Tetris Effect.

Toshihiro Nagoshi is a Japanese video game producer, director and designer. He was the chief creative officer for Sega until 2021 when he became creative director. He went on to be the general director of Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio, and later became a member of the board of directors for Atlus. He joined Sega in 1989. After 30 years in the company, Nagoshi left Sega to join NetEase in late-2021.

Yuji Naka is a Japanese video game programmer, designer, and producer who was the former head of Sega's Sonic Team, where he was the lead programmer of the original Sonic the Hedgehog series of games on the Sega Mega Drive. With Sega, Naka also led development on games including Nights into Dreams (1996), Burning Rangers (1998), Sonic Adventure (1998), and three games in the Phantasy Star franchise (1987-2000). In 2006, he left Sega to found Prope, an independent game company. Naka also worked under Square Enix to direct Balan Wonderworld (2021).

Tomohiro Nishikado is a Japanese video game developer and engineer. He is the creator of the arcade fixed shooter Space Invaders, released to the public in 1978 by the Taito of Japan, often credited as the first shoot 'em up and for beginning the golden age of video arcade games. Originally Nishikado wanted to use airplanes as enemies for Space Invaders, but would have encountered problems making them move smoothly due to the limited computing power at the time. Humans would have been easier to render, but management at Taito forbade the use of human targets.

Hisashi Nogami is a Japanese video game designer, director, and producer working for Nintendo. Nogami is well-known for working in the Animal Crossing and Splatoon series.

Naoto Ohshima is a Japanese artist and video game designer best known for designing the Sonic the Hedgehog and Dr. Eggman characters from Sega's Sonic the Hedgehog franchise. Although Yuji Naka created the original tech demo around which Sonic's gameplay was based, the character in his prototype was a ball that lacked any specific features. Sonic Team considered numerous potential animal mascots before deciding on Ohshima's design, with an armadillo or hedgehog being the top choices because their spikes worked well with the concept of rolling into enemies.

Michio Okamura is a computer game developer and artist. He was the lead artist for the popular computer game Diablo, and senior artist on Diablo II. He designed many of the game's characters, including the title character. He is currently the art director for Rumble Entertainment.

Yutaka "Yoot" Saito is a Japanese video game designer. In 1996, he founded the video game development company Vivarium. His latest game is Aero Porter, which is part of a collection of games called Guild01 for the Nintendo 3DS. In the Americas, Europe, and Australia, Aero Porter was released as a standalone game on the Nintendo eShop. Yoot also developed Odama for the Nintendo GameCube and Seaman 2.

Hironobu Sakaguchi is a Japanese game designer, director, producer and writer. Originally working for Square from 1983 to 2003, he departed the company and founded independent studio Mistwalker in 2004. He is known as the creator of the Final Fantasy franchise, in addition to other titles during his time at Square. At Mistwalker, he is known for creating the Blue Dragon and Terra Battle series among several standalone titles, moving away from home consoles and creating titles for mobile platforms.

Yoshio Sakamoto is a Japanese video game designer, director, and producer. He has worked at Nintendo since 1982. He has directed several games in the Metroid series. He is one of the most prominent members of Nintendo's former Research and Development 1 division, along with Gunpei Yokoi and Toru Osawa.

Masahiro Sakurai is a Japanese video game director, game designer and songwriter best known as the creator of the Kirby and Super Smash Bros. series. Apart from his work on those series, he also led the design of Meteos in 2005 and directed Kid Icarus: Uprising in 2012.

Goichi Suda , known by his alias Suda51, is a Japanese video game designer, writer and director. Affiliated with Human Entertainment from 1994 to 1998, he founded Grasshopper Manufacture in 1998 with a number of other Human Entertainment staff to produce their own titles. His best-known work has come from Grasshopper Manufacture, including The Silver Case (1999), Killer7 (2005), and the No More Heroes series.

Hidetaka Suehiro , known as SWERY or Swery65, is a Japanese video game director and writer. He was one of the founding members of the game development studio Access Games which is based in Osaka. His roles in the company included director, designer, and writer. He is the director of the games Spy Fiction, Deadly Premonition and D4: Dark Dreams Don't Die. He then left the company in 2016, and he founded a new studio, named White Owls Inc.

Yu Suzuki is a Japanese game designer, producer, programmer, and engineer, who headed Sega's AM2 team for 18 years. Considered one of the first auteurs of video games, he has been responsible for a number of Sega's arcade hits, including three-dimensional sprite-scaling games that used "taikan" motion simulator arcade cabinets, such as Hang-On, Space Harrier, Out Run, and After Burner, and pioneering polygonal 3D games such as Virtua Racing and Virtua Fighter, which are credited with popularizing 3D graphics in video games, as well as the critically acclaimed Shenmue series. As a hardware engineer, he led the development of various arcade system boards, including the Sega Space Harrier, Model 1, Model 2, and Model 3, and was involved in the technical development of the Dreamcast console and its corresponding NAOMI arcade hardware.

Hiroyuki Takahashi, is the president of video game developing company Camelot Software Planning. He has directly participated in most of the projects of the company, particularly as a writer, art director, producer and game designer.

Keita Takahashi is a Japanese game designer and artist, his most notable titles being Katamari Damacy and its sequel, We Love Katamari. The original Katamari game was a surprise hit and was praised for its quirkiness, originality, and charm. Takahashi is married to pianist and composer Asuka Sakai, who has worked with Takahashi on various projects.

Jun Takeuchi is a Japanese video game director and producer. He graduated from the Division of Graphics at the Sozosha College of Design and joined the game development company Capcom in 1991. He served as the producer for Onimusha 3 and Lost Planet and chief producer for Resident Evil 5. Takeuchi has also worked on other Capcom games such as Street Fighter II for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System and Resident Evil and Resident Evil 2 for the PlayStation.

Shu Takumi is a Japanese video game designer, director, and writer at Capcom. He is best known for his work on the Ace Attorney series, serving as director and scenario writer for the original trilogy. In addition, he provided the Japanese voice of Phoenix Wright for the first four games. He then served as director and scenario writer for Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective in 2010.

Kensuke Tanabe is a Japanese video game designer, producer and director working for Nintendo, where he currently is Senior Officer at Nintendo EPD.

Hiromichi Tanaka is a Japanese video game developer, game producer, game director and game designer. He was Senior Vice President of Software Development at Square Enix and the head of the company's Product Development Division-3.

Takashi Tezuka is a Japanese video game designer, director and producer. He is a senior officer of Nintendo EPD and executive at Nintendo.

Keiichirō Toyama is a Japanese video game director and designer, best known as the creator of the Silent Hill, Siren and Gravity Rush franchises.

Kotaro Uchikoshi is a Japanese video game director and writer. He is known for his work on visual novel games, including the Infinity and Zero Escape series. His writing style often incorporates elements of science fiction with various scientific and philosophical themes, and makes heavy use of plot twists.

Fumito Ueda is a Japanese video game designer. Ueda is best known as the director and lead designer of Ico (2001) and Shadow of the Colossus (2005) while leading Team Ico at Japan Studio, and The Last Guardian (2016) through his own development company GenDesign. His games have achieved cult status and are distinguished by their usage of minimal plot and scenario using fictional languages, and use of overexposed, desaturated light. He has been described by some as an auteur of video games.

Yasuhiro Wada is a Japanese video game designer and producer. He is known for his work on Story of Seasons, formerly known as the Harvest Moon series. Despite acclaim and success from the series, he decided to no longer work on the series and focus on other projects in 2009.

Kazunori Yamauchi , nicknamed "Kaz", is a Japanese game designer and professional racing driver. He is CEO of Polyphony Digital and producer of the Gran Turismo video game series.

Hirokazu Yasuhara is a Japanese video game designer. He is best known for designing the gameplay and stages of the initial Sonic the Hedgehog video games for Sega Genesis in the 1990s, based on technical demos and engines programmed by Yuji Naka. Yasuhara stayed with Sega until the late 1990s. He then joined Naughty Dog, working on the Jak and Daxter series and Uncharted: Drake's Fortune, collaborating again with former Sega employee Mark Cerny. He was the senior design director at Namco Bandai Games America. In April 2012, Yasuhara joined Nintendo where he accepted a position at the Nintendo Software Technology division. He has since worked for Unity Technologies.

Gunpei Yokoi , sometimes transliterated Gumpei Yokoi, was a Japanese video game designer. He was a long-time Nintendo employee, best known as creator of the Game & Watch handheld system, inventor of the "cross" shaped Control Pad, the original designer of the Game Boy, and producer of a few long-running and critically acclaimed video game franchises, such as Metroid and Kid Icarus.

Naoki Yoshida , also known by the nickname Yoshi-P, is a Japanese video game producer, director and designer working for Square Enix. He is known primarily for his work on massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs), as chief planner on Dragon Quest X and as director and producer of Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn. He is also currently working as producer for the upcoming Final Fantasy XVI. He is credited with rescuing the original Final Fantasy XIV project from its disastrous launch. Yoshida is an Executive Officer at Square Enix, the Head of Square Enix's Creative Business Unit III and part of the Final Fantasy Committee that is tasked with keeping the franchise's releases and content consistent.