Yoshiki Okamoto

岡本 吉起

He is a legendary name in the video game world. At one time he was one of the top guys at Capcom and helped work on games such as Resident Evil. He has his own company now called Flagship. Flagship is known primarily as the scenario creator for Resident Evil 2 and Dino Crisis.

Yoshiki's company has support coming from all sides, Sony, Nintendo and Sega, releasing games from Flagship on each console. Most recently, they released Resident Evil: Code Veronica for the Dreamcast. Coming up, Yoshiki and Flagship are creating the scenarios for three Zelda games for the Game Boy Color.

Mr. Okamoto was making games a long time before his current crop of console titles. He is a legend in the business and has a reputation for doing things his own way. He got his start in the industry over twenty years ago. However he was not a programmer at the beginning of his career, but he soon found himself in that role.

Yoshiki Okamoto found himself working as a graphic artist at Konami back in 1980. Soon after beginning he was asked to design a driving game (even though he was hired as an artist, and not a programmer). Yoshiki didn't like driving games at all (his favorite game was Bosconian), so he decided to make a game like Bosconian instead. He also had a few people creating a rather crappy driving game as well (just in case).

Yoshiki's boss eventually asked to see the game, and Yoshiki showed him Time Pilot instead. The boss was pretty angry, but he agreed to test the game on location. The test was successful and Time Pilot was put into regular production (and Yoshiki's boss attempted to take credit for it). The un-named driving game was never released. Yoshiki only stayed at Konami for a short period of time after that (he finished the revolutionary title Gyruss right before he left).

A few years later he went to work at Capcom, where he once again began to redesign the video game world in his own image. One of his first titles with Capcom was 1942, a vertical scrolling shooter that is still being copied to this day. He then went on to design the original Street Fighter (which was a flop at the time). Final Fight came soon afterwards, and Final Fight changed everything about beat 'em ups, almost every side scrolling beat 'em up since Final Fight has drawn much inspiration from it (or from its many imitators).

Then Street Fighter II: The World Warrior came out. This game was one of the most successful games of all times, spawned an entire genre, and managed to play a large part in virtual death of the arcade industry. Streetfighter (and its sequels, clones, and imitators), quickly saturated the market, and arcades briefly enjoyed a new popularity. But unfortunately it did not last. The new breed of fighting games made money, a lot of money. A busy machine could take in $30 or more an hour. So arcade operators quickly replaced almost all their games with fighting games, and this soon caused their demise. Many longtime arcade players lost interest in arcades altogether, because you couldn't find anything except for driving and fighting games. Casual players began to lose interest as well, because it is nearly impossible to play against a seasoned fighting game veteran for more than a few seconds without being defeated. Soon those once busy arcades were virtual ghost towns, with rows and rows of unplayed fighting games, everyone had just lost interest. The game owners no longer had the money to replace those fighting games, and there was little to pick from anyway, as the industry met demands and cranked out almost nothing but fighting games for years.

Of course you certainly can't blame Mr. Okamoto for the effects his Street Fighter games had on the industry. He didn't force anyone to convert their entire game inventory over to fighting games, but most arcade owners did, and that is why there are hardly any arcades left anymore.