Kenji Eno

Japan · Born 1970 · Warp, From Yellow to Orange · Game Director, Composer

The founder of Warp, who made the horror games D and Enemy Zero, an audio-only game playable without sight, and one of the most theatrical stunts in console history.

Kenji Eno was born in Arakawa, Tokyo, on 5 May 1970. In 1994 he founded the developer Warp with a small team of programmers and designers, and he quickly became one of the most distinctive figures of the CD-ROM era: a director who also composed music and treated each game as an experiment. Warp's first major success was D (1995), a full-motion-video horror adventure for the 3DO and Saturn. Its follow-up, Enemy Zero, was originally meant for the PlayStation. At a 1996 press event, Eno instead showed a video in which the PlayStation logo morphed into the Sega Saturn logo, announcing that Enemy Zero would be a Saturn exclusive — a public switch of platforms that is still remembered as one of the boldest moves of the console wars. Enemy Zero was released for the Saturn in 1996. Eno's most unusual project was Real Sound: Kaze no Regret (1997), an adventure told entirely through audio, which could be played by people with no sight. Warp disbanded shortly after releasing D2 in 2000. Eno founded a new company, From Yellow to Orange, in 2001, and later made the Wii game You, Me, and the Cubes (2009). He died in Tokyo on 20 February 2013, aged 42, of heart failure brought on by hypertension.