Biography

When you're a kid and get your first bike, you want to go somewhere you've never been before. That's like Pokémon. Everybody shares the same experience, but everybody wants to take it someplace else. And you can do that.

As a child, I wanted to be an entomologist. Insects fascinated me.

Every time I found a new insect, it was mysterious to me. And the more I searched for insects, the more I found.

In Japan, violence in games is pretty much self-regulated. In the 1980s, there was a game called Bullfighter where the matador stabbed the bull and red blood squirted out. The day after it was released, they changed the blood to green. There's more violence in games in the U.S., in things like Mortal Kombat, where they rip out hearts and cut off heads. Japanese people wouldn't come up with ideas of blood splattering all over. Japanese focus more on the intricacies of the actions, the motion.

The more I learned about games, the more frustrated I became because the games weren't very good. I could tell a good game from a bad game. My conclusion was: let's make our own games.