Keiji Inafune

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Keiji Inafune with his trademark creation Rockman/Mega Man
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Keiji Inafune with his trademark creation Rockman/Mega Man

Keiji "The Killa" Inafune (稲船 敬二 Inafune Keiji?, born 8 May 1965) is the creator of the Mega Man, Onimusha, and Dead Rising video game series and designs characters for many other Capcom games, and is the head of the Capcom Production Studio 2. In most game credits, he uses the name "INAFKING". Characters from the Street Fighter and Mega Man series have become some of the most well-known and recognizable video game characters, making Keiji Inafune a large part of Capcom's success.

Contents

[edit] Biography

[edit] Early Projects

In 1987, Keiji joined the corporation of Capcom not long after graduating in search of a job as an illustrator. His first assignment as a designer was Street Fighter (1987), which became a very popular fighting game series after the release of Street Fighter II in 1991. At the time, Capcom focused on the expansion of the home video gaming market; particularly the Famicom from Nintendo. Previously, most games released to the system were ports (release of a game to a different system). Now wanting to capitalize on the fledgling Nintendo system, Keiji's superiors directed him to create a new video game called "Rockman". Capcom's artist and developer teams were still diminutive at that period in time, and so Keiji was directed to be one of the leading artists to the new project.

When it came to the design for the Rockman game (which was later changed to "Mega Man" in North America), Keiji developed all the character art and designs. Due to the small taskforce, he also constructed the characters into pixel form, as well as the game's respective logo, package design, and instruction booklet. As the Famicom was an early gaming system, 56 pixels were available for color extrusion, the majority of which were blue-tinted. This affected the decision to color the character, and Keiji noted he went with that, coloring the character blue (which later fans noting the character as the "blue bomber" as result). The designs of Keiji's character was also heavily influenced by Japanese animation, and he notes that he took observations from other video game characters present at the time, such as Mario.

In development of the game, Keiji incorporated many references to various music genres, such as Rock, which is the source of the Japanese name of "Rockman". Along with this, the team made a gaming system pertaining to the rock-paper-scissors concept, one which the various Mega Man series still revolves around today. The first Rockman/Mega Man game was released in December 1987, after which sells in both countries were competent, but as Keiji later notes, " "While it did sell more than we had expected, [Rockman 1] wasn't a huge success as far as the numbers go,". Noting this, Capcom superiors dictated that the team begin on a new project called Professional Baseball Murder Mystery, which was only released in Japan. However, the team felt strongly about the Rockman series, and urged that they be permitted to construct another iteration in order to amend the previous failings of the original and continue in the light of creativity. Capcom allowed Keiji's team to continue, with the prerequisites of completing Professional Baseball Murder Mystery as well. The team did so, completing the project on their own time, and on December 24, 1988, released Rockman 2, with Mega Man 2 being released later in North America in 1989. The project proved to be a huge success, earning more than its previous iteration. The company realized that the Mega Man series was a profitable investment, and many ports were constructed along with regular installments released on a yearly basis.

The success of the Famicom began to fade into obscurity in light of its successor, the Super Famicom, and Keiji set his sights on the development on a new series called "Rockman X", which continued the plot of the original series, but set a darker tone and took place 100 years after the previous storyline. Keiji developed the characters X, and Zero, and as before, released yearly installments of the series, beginning with the first game, Rockman X. Originally, Zero was meant to be the leading character of the X series, but Capcom executives convinced Inafune to continue with the analogous design from the original game. Ironically Zero became quite popular anyway, obtaining his own game series years later (Megaman Zero).

During the 32-bit era, Keiji produced the three-dimensional Rockman DASH/Mega Man Legends series after receiving requests from Sony to develop a new 3D Rockman series exclusively for the Playstation, he concurred. The series is currently on hiatus and has spawned the fewest sequels and is mostly released in parts.

Originally, Keiji had intended to end the series' plot at the installment of Rockman X5, and had begun development on the Rockman Zero series, in order to elaborate on the character of Zero. However, he had departed to another studio in cooperation with Inticreates, and unbeknown to him, another installment (Rockman X6) was created. This set a slight continuity error in Keiji's intention for the plot, but through some changes in the storyline, was alleviated.

[edit] Later projects and beyond

One of Keiji's recent additions is the now-popular Rockman.EXE/Megaman Battle Network series, which is set outside the continuity of the rest of the Mega Man storylines and introduced RPG and strategy elements. According to Inafune, he received the basis for creating the series from observing his son. On April 2, 2005, Inafune was promoted from corporate officer to senior corporate officer. Keiji also developed another series, called Onimusha, which has spawned various sequels, and focuses on past Japan, Samurai warriors, and magic. Also, Inafune is involved in Inticreates' creation of the latest Rockman project, Rockman ZX.

Inafune and his team are currently working on a single game for Xbox 360. They have finished off Dead Rising. Dead Rising is a zombie-slaying game released by Capcom in the U.S. on August 8, 2006. It is heavily influenced by George A. Romero's 1979 movie Dawn of the Dead. It marks the second zombie game Inafune has worked on as he was involved in part on Resident Evil 2. Though he was involved in Resident Evil 4, the game does not actually involve zombies.

Inafune is working on another Xbox 360 game, titled Lost Planet and it is based on an entirely frozen planet. It's a science fiction action game with a similar camera angle to Resident Evil 4. It swaps between on foot and mech based gameplay, and showcases some very impressive weather effects. Keiji has said that the setting is based in part on John Carpenter's The Thing. It is due for release in the US in early 2007, and in Japan a few months prior to that.

[edit] Works

Note: Keiji Inafune has not been involved directly with some iterations of the Mega Man series (such as Mega Man X6) but as a designer, has overseen production of every installment at one point or another. This applies to other titles such as Onimusha: Dawn of Dreams, Dead Rising, and Lost Planet.

[edit] Rockman/Mega Man

Note: Not all games are included here, especially the Japan-only releases

[edit] Original Rockman/Mega Man series

[edit] Rockman X/Mega Man X

[edit] Rockman Zero/Mega Man Zero

[edit] Rockman DASH/Mega Man Legends

[edit] Rockman.EXE/MegaMan Battle Network

[edit] Biohazard/Resident Evil

[edit] Onimusha

[edit] Other games

[edit] References

  1. ↑  MegaMan Network (2004). Interview with Keiji Inafune. Capcom. Retrieved on May 4, 2006.
  2. ↑  MegaMan Neoseeker (2005). Interview with Keiji Inafune 2. Capcom. Retrieved on May 4, 2006.
  3. ↑  Gamespy (2005). Interview with Keiji Inafune 3. Capcom. Retrieved on May 8, 2006.
  4. ↑  Xbox 360 official magazine site (2005). Interview with Keiji Inafune 4. Capcom. Retrieved on May 8, 2006.
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