Yoshio Sakamoto

Japan · Born 1959 · Nintendo · Game Designer, Director, Producer

The Nintendo designer behind Metroid's characters, the Famicom Detective Club mysteries and the direction of Super Metroid — and later of WarioWare, Rhythm Heaven and Tomodachi Life.

Yoshio Sakamoto was born on 23 July 1959 in Nara Prefecture and joined Nintendo in 1982 after graduating from art college. His first work was pixel art, for the Game & Watch version of Donkey Kong and for the arcade Donkey Kong Jr. He then joined the team working under Gunpei Yokoi in Nintendo's Research and Development 1 department. There he helped create two of the Famicom's most distinctive games. On Metroid (1986) he created the characters, credited under the alias "Shikamoto", and he was a game designer on Kid Icarus. He was also the lead scenario writer and creator of the Famicom Detective Club adventure games, whose first two entries were among the most influential Japanese mystery adventures of the 1980s. Sakamoto directed Super Metroid (1994), whose atmosphere and wordless storytelling made it a template for exploration games, and later Metroid Fusion, Metroid: Zero Mission and Metroid: Other M. In parallel he moved into very different work as a producer and director, overseeing the WarioWare, Rhythm Heaven and Tomodachi Life series. He has described his aim as coming up with something very different from what Shigeru Miyamoto would make. Since 2015 he has been a senior officer in Nintendo's Entertainment Planning & Development division.