Keiji Inafune

Keiji Inafune (稲船 敬二) is a Japanese video game producer, illustrator and businessman.

Inafune was born in Kishiwada, Osaka in 1965.

Starting his career at Capcom in the late 1980s, his job was as an artist and illustrator.

The first two games he worked on were the original Street Fighter and Mega Man in 1987.

He was then an illustrator and artist of the Mega Man series during the NES and Super NES era.

For Mega Man X, he created and designed the character Zero.

He received a degree in graphic design in 1987 from the Osaka Designers' College.

Soon after graduating the 22-year-old Inafune joined the Capcom corporation in 1987, in search of a job as an illustrator.

Inafune had initially wanted to join Konami, but Capcom was much closer.

In many early game credits at Capcom, he is credited under the name "INAFKING", which he got by combining the name "Snufkin" from the anime series Moomin with his own name. The first two titles Inafune worked on at Capcom was Mega Man (known in Japan as "Rockman") for the Famicom and the original Street Fighter for arcades, both of which were released in 1987.

For Street Fighter, Inafune drew character portraits for the game.

For Mega Man, Inafune designed several minor enemy characters, and also designed the boss character "Elec Man", who was the first original game character that Inafune designed.

Inafune had tried to design him as if he was a character an American comic series such as Spider-Man or X-Men.

Inafune also drew the Japanese box art and promotional illustrations and worked on in-game animations and pixel art.

Director Akira Kitamura created the original static pixel art sprite for Rock Man (later called "Mega Man" outside of Japan).

This was to ensure that the sprite could be properly seen against the game's backgrounds, and could work in the game.

After that, the pixel art was handed over to artist Inafune, who created a refined illustration of the character.

Inafune refers to this process as "like a reverse character design" as it is the opposite of what typically occurs, where artists create concept art which is then translated into game's graphics.

The first Mega Man game was released in December 1987, after which sales in both countries were decent, but as Inafune later notes, "While it did sell more than we had expected, [Rockman 1] wasn't a huge success as far as the numbers go."

Akira Kitamura suggested to create a contest to solicit designs from fans for Robot Masters for Mega Man games.

The first game to do this was Mega Man 2 and it was Inafune's job to turn those winning designs into finished professional designs.

The next game in the series was Mega Man 3, released in Japan on September 28, 1990 and later released in North America in November 1990.

Inafune considers Mega Man 3 to be one of his least favorite Mega Man games.

The next original character design Inafune would create was the character "Punk" in the 1992 Game Boy game Mega Man III.

Capcom set on the development on a new series for the Super NES, Mega Man X, which continued the plot of the original series, but set a darker tone and took place 100 years after the previous storyline.

Inafune then moved onto the position of producer with his first title being Mega Man 8 in 1996.

In addition to being the producer for Mega Man X4, the three Mega Man Legends games, the Mega Man Zero series, the Mega Man Battle Network and Mega Man Star Force series and Mega Man ZX and Advent, Inafune was also a producer of the Lost Planet, Dead Rising and Onimusha series.

In 2006, he was promoted to Senior Corporate Officer of Research & Development.

During a special event at TGS 2007, Inafune clarified his role in the creation of Mega Man.

"'I'm often called the father of Mega Man, but actually, his design was already created when I joined Capcom,' he explained. 'My mentor [Capcom senior member Akira Kitamura], who was the designer of the original Mega Man, had a basic concept of what Mega Man was supposed to look like. So I only did half of the job in creating him.'"

From an interview with Nintendo Power in the October 2007 issue, Inafune explained that the reason was because of "...what went into the game and what was behind the release of the game."

He also stated that the team was forced to put the game out before they thought it was ready and that during the game's production, the developers had lost the main planner, Inafune having to take his position.

Inafune concluded, "I knew that if we had more time to polish it, we could do a lot of things better, make it a better game, but the company (Capcom) said that we needed to release it. The whole environment behind what went into the production of the game is what I least favored. Numbers one and two – I really wanted to make the games; I was so excited about them. Number three – it just turned very different."

In 2009, he was chosen by IGN as one of the top 100 game creators of all time.

In 2010, he became Global Head of Production at Capcom.

He left Capcom in late 2010, and later founded his own companies Comcept, and Intercept.

He also became Representative Director of DiNG, a mobile game studio.

Intercept worked on the game Kaio: King of Pirates which was announced in 2011 and cancelled in 2015.

While at Comcept, Inafune oversaw work on such games as Mighty No. 9, Soul Sacrifice, and the unreleased Red Ash: The Indelible Legend.

In 2017, Comcept was purchased and became a subsidiary of Level-5, becoming Level-5 Comcept.