Tokuro Fujiwara

Japan · Born 1961 · Konami, Capcom, Whoopee Camp · Game Director, Producer

The Capcom director behind Commando, Ghosts 'n Goblins and Bionic Commando, producer of Mega Man, and the man whose horror RPG Sweet Home became the basis for Resident Evil.

Tokuro Fujiwara was born on 7 April 1961 and studied at Osaka Designers' College. He began his career at Konami in 1982 as a game designer and graphic artist, working on the arcade games Pooyan and Roc'n Rope, and in 1983 he moved to Capcom alongside Yoshiki Okamoto. At Capcom he directed several of the company's defining arcade games of the mid-1980s: the vertically scrolling shooter Commando (1985), the punishing platformer Ghosts 'n Goblins (1985), and Bionic Commando (1987), whose grappling-arm hero could not jump. He became the main producer of the Mega Man series and worked on Strider (1989). In 1989 he directed Sweet Home, a Famicom horror RPG based on a Japanese film, set in a haunted mansion with limited inventory, item management and permanent character deaths. Years later Fujiwara conceived Resident Evil as a remake of Sweet Home and served as the game's general producer, linking his 8-bit experiment directly to the survival horror genre. He left Capcom in 1996 to found his own studio, Whoopee Camp, which made Tomba! (1997) and Tomba! 2 (1999) before closing in 2000. He has since worked as a consultant, and the Whoopee Camp name appeared again on Ghosts 'n Goblins Resurrection in 2021.