Keiji Inafune

Keiji Inafune (稲船敬二) is the creator of the Mega Man and Onimusha video game series and designs characters for many other Capcom games. He is the head of Capcom Production Studio 2. In most game credits, he uses the name INAFKING.

He joined Capcom not long after graduating in search of a job as an illustrator. His first assignment as a designer was Street Fighter (1987), which became a very popular fighting game series after the release of Street Fighter II in 1991.

Not long after Street Fighter, he was asked to help in a project for the home system Nintendo Famicom. For this purpose, he created Mega Man and the Robot Masters found in the first Mega Man game.

Characters from the Street Fighter and Mega Man series have become some of the most well-known and recognizable video game characters, making Keiji Inafune a large part of Capcom's success.

On April 2, 2005, Inafune was promoted from corporate officer to senior corporate officer.

Inafune and his team are currently working on two games for the XBox 360. They are finishing off Dead Rising. Dead Rising will be a zombie-slaying game slated for release by Capcom in the second quarter of 2006. It is heavily influenced by the two Dawn of the Dead movies and the series of zombie movies released by George Romero. It marks the second zombie game Inafune has worked on as he was involved in part on Resident Evil 2. Though he was involved in Resident Evil 4, the game does not actually involve zombies.

The second XBox 360 title his team is working on is called Lost Planet and it is based on an entirely frozen planet. It's a science fiction action game with a similar camera angle to Resident Evil 4. It swaps between on foot and mech based gameplay, and showcases some very impressive weather effects. Keiji has said that the setting is based in part on John Carpenter's The Thing. It is due for release in the US in early 2007, and in Japan a few months prior to that.