Hajime Katoki

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Hajime Katoki (Japanese: カトキハジメ Katoki Hajime)is a popular Japanese mecha designer. He has done works for animes such as the Gundam series and the video game series Virtual On.

Born in 1963, he gained fame with his designs for the graphic novel Gundam Sentinel. He then worked in the OVA series Gundam 0083, where he designed the famous RX-78 GP03 Dendrobium Orchis mobile weapon. His next big work was V Gundam, where he was the main mechanical designer, creating the main mobile suits Victory Gundam, V2 Gundam and the hefty V2 Assault Buster Gundam. After that, he worked in G Gundam, now in design of the evil mobile suits. He then worked in Gundam W on some minor mobile suits, but in Gundam W Endless Waltz he designed all of the mobile suits, and re-designed the gundams with a more fantastic style, creating one of his most famous mechs: the XXXG-00W0 Wing Gundam Zero Custom. To correspond with these new designs, he also redesigned the 5 original Gundams from Gundam W, as a result, his redesign of Wing Gundam has become a popular model kit.

Katoki also has worked in Super Robot Wars and Virtual On video games, and in the Patlabor 2 movie. He also does touch-up design in the many mobile suits for the Master Grade kits from Bandai.

In his art book Gundam Fix the artist had this to say about mecha design. "Do people, like myself, spend time imagining what it would be like if Gundam robots were actually present on the streets of our cities? Are you sure you're not limiting yourself to the images that were offered in the animated series? One of the reasons that I fell in love with Gundam was that it excites me to imagine what it would be like if these machines actually existed, and I worry that other fans may be losing out..." He said he hopes his work will catch peoples' attention"...then people who had never before been drawn in by the magic of these giant robots may discover their attraction for the first time."