Keiji Inafune

Important developer and graphic designer of Megaman and Onimusha, as well as the famous Dead Rising saga. The characters from Mega Man and Street Fighter series have become some of the most recognized video game characters in the world, making Keiji Inafune a big part of Capcom's success.

• When was he born: 05/08/1965
• Nationality: Japanese
• Profession: Video game developer

Who is Keiji Inafune?

Keiji Inafune is a famous graphic designer and game developer. Widely recognized worldwide for his Street Fighter, Mega Man and Resident Evil sagas, games that catapulted his career worldwide.

Biography of Keiji Inafune

Born in Japan, in a place known as Osaka, Kishiwada. When he was only 22 years old, he joined the Capcom Corporation shortly after his graduation in 1987, trying to work as a cartoonist. His first job as a graphic designer was for the popular game Street Fighter, which was released in 1987. At the same time, Capcom focused on expanding into home consoles, especially Nintendo’s Famicon, and it was this company that saw Inafune’s great potential as a graphic illustrator. His first job was to design for the game known as Street Fighter, which was released in 1987 and which at the beginning did not have much public acceptance, until the second series was released.

Observing that the game had not had much acceptance the company decided to give Inafune, the baton to create a new game whose name must be Rockman. All the game designs were created by him due to the lack of company personnel, the box design, the logo and the game instructions. RockMan or Mega Man, as the character was also known in Western markets, went on sale in December 1987, and despite being considered a legendary work in industry, failed at that time to have a wide exit in video games market, nor managed to be a commercial success, even though, it sold more than Capcom itself expected.

Inafune and his team managed to convince Capcom management to allow them to make a new RockMan saga delivery, as they had become very attached and wanted to continue it. To do this, the company set two conditions that must follow, one was to fix all the bugs that had the original title, and the second was to end before the Baseball Murder Mystery and NES Legendary Wings developments. Keiji Inafune and his collaborators team managed to achieve the set goal and managed to launch the game at the end of 1988, thus launching the second installment of Megan Man. On this occasion, sales increased incredibly, and Capcom began to realize that this saga could bring enormous economic benefits.

Style of Keiji Inafune

When it came to design the character for his most important game, Inafune relied heavily on mangas and animes of his own country and of which many around the world are fanatics, but also decided to be inspired by the most successful games of his time, including, for example, Mario Bros. In terms of the character’s characteristic blue color, it must be recognized that more than an artistic inspiration, what led him to use it were NES technical limitations.

The console was only capable of displaying 56 colors on screen, and the vast majority of them had blue tones. That’s why Inafune decided that the ideal color for his character was blue. Until today, Mega Man 2 is regarded worldwide as the best Mega Man ever and is also Inafune’s own favorite. His style also denotes his zombie hobby and after working on Resident Evil, he decided to create his own saga adding this theme.

Featured video games of Keiji Inafune

Onimusha saga, which was released in 2001 for PlayStation 2. This saga has expanded to seven installments, of which Inafune was executive producer on Onimusha 1 and 2, Onimusha Blade Warriors, Onimusha 3: Demon Siege and Onimusha: Dawn of Dreams.

Inafune is also the scriptwriter for Paramount Pictures adaptation. This film he’s working on doesn’t have a definite release date yet.

Inafune’s influence extends to the mythical Zelda saga as he is the producer of The Legend of Zelda: The Minish Cap.

He created the Onimusha saga, which debuted in 2001 on PlayStation 2.

He was part of the team that created several of the most acclaimed installments of the Resident Evil saga.

Executive Producer of Resident Evil during the fourth installment in the original PlayStation 2 version.

Producer of Mega Man Zero.