Yoshiki Okamoto’s first game was the one he was told not to make. At Konami in the early 1980s his boss asked him for a game about a driving school. Okamoto thought it would never sell, and instead built a shooting game about aircraft in secret. When management found out, just before it went out for location testing, his boss told him: “You’re fired!” Then the test results came in, players loved it, and Konami’s president came to praise it. The game was Time Pilot, and nobody fired anyone. Okamoto told the story to the Japanese site Denfaminicogamer in 2023. “I thought I was being told to make something that sells,” he explained.
Fast facts
- Born: 1961, in Ehime Prefecture, Japan.
- Konami (from 1981): joined as a designer; Time Pilot and Gyruss.
- Capcom: joined in 1983 or 1984 as its ninth employee; designer of 1942 (1984); producer of Final Fight (1989); head of development in the years of Street Fighter II and Resident Evil; later a member of the board.
- Flagship: a scenario-writing company he owned, working with Capcom by 1999.
- Game Republic: founded after he left Capcom in 2003; Genji (2005), Genji: Days of the Blade (2006), Folklore (2007).
- Later: Monster Strike (Mixi, 2013), a YouTube channel and a game company in Malaysia.
Konami
Okamoto joined Konami in 1981, when it had about 80 staff, as a designer hired to draw artwork and characters, and was soon planning games instead. One of the colleagues he worked alongside was Tokuro Fujiwara. After Time Pilot he worked on Gyruss. Edge later called him “the driving force behind Gyruss, Time Pilot” and the rest of his early hits.
He left after about three years. In the 2023 interview he put it down to pay: he felt the company treated people unequally, with new recruits starting on more than he had, and peers given identical raises regardless of what they had done. Retro Gamer has written that Konami “jettisoned” him; in his own account, pay was what decided it.
Capcom and 1942
Capcom’s founder, Kenzo Tsujimoto, promised Okamoto that he could lead development. When he arrived, aged 22, the company had seven employees and no developers of its own; he was the ninth. Fujiwara had been invited separately, and the two of them went together.
His first big game was 1942, released in December 1984: a vertically scrolling shoot ’em up over the Pacific, in which American pilots fight the Japanese air force near Midway. Okamoto said the foreign heroes were deliberate, to give the game a chance overseas. Edge later wrote that it “made the company’s name”, and Retro Gamer that it “caused an instant upturn in fortunes”. Retro Gamer also traced most of Capcom’s early hits to just two people, Fujiwara and Okamoto, with “a friendly sense of competition” between them.
Final Fight and Street Fighter II
By the end of the decade Okamoto was producing rather than designing. He produced Final Fight (1989), the side-scrolling brawler Capcom first showed as Street Fighter ’89, and as Capcom’s head of development he oversaw Street Fighter II in 1991 and Resident Evil in 1996. The producer of Street Fighter II was Noritaka Funamizu, as Funamizu himself told Edge, with Akira Nishitani and Akira Yasuda as its planners. The press has often given Okamoto more of the credit: Edge called him “the producer of Street Fighter II” in 1999 and its “spiritual father” in 2010.
Through the late 1990s his name sat at the top of Capcom’s credits. The in-game credits of the company’s Saturn and Dreamcast releases list him as executive producer of Mega Man 8, Mega Man X4, Marvel vs. Capcom and Power Stone, as general producer of Street Fighter Alpha 3 and Super Puzzle Fighter II Turbo, and as supervisor of Resident Evil 2 and Dino Crisis. He also owned Flagship, a company that wrote stories and scenarios for Capcom games, and in 2000 Edge reported that he had written the scripts for the first six chapters of Eldorado Gate, an episodic role-playing game for the Dreamcast. By 2001 he was a managing director of Capcom, and he announced its support for Microsoft’s Xbox on stage that year. In January 2003 Edge described him as Capcom’s chief operating officer.
Game Republic
Okamoto left Capcom in 2003 and set up his own developer, Game Republic. Public accounts of its founding date differ, from 2003 to 2005. He explained why to Edge in 2010: “I was told to make sequels to our franchises like Rockman [Mega Man] or Biohazard [Resident Evil] or Street Fighter, but I did not join the games industry to spend my time making sequels.” In 2005 he put the difference more simply: “Big game makers have to create titles that they are sure will sell, as they have to consider stockholders and yearly sales. However, if you start your own company you can create new titles.”
The new titles had a hard time. Genji (2005) was a samurai action game for the PlayStation 2. Its sequel, Genji: Days of the Blade, was moved during development to the PlayStation 3 and became a launch game for the new console, built, Edge said, mostly without PS3 tools or development kits. It was not a success, and neither, beyond a cult following, was Folklore (2007). By 2010 Game Republic had about 300 staff in Tokyo, Nagoya and Osaka and was making Clash of the Titans for Bandai Namco and an original game, Majin. Okamoto argued that Japanese developers needed to aim at overseas markets: “My personal opinion is that we need to go overseas.”
It did not work out. In 2011 Kotaku reported that Game Republic had closed its Osaka and Nagoya branches. The company stopped trading in 2013 and stayed on the books as a dormant company until the Tokyo District Court opened bankruptcy proceedings against it on 10 June 2026.
Monster Strike and after
Okamoto’s next success came on phones. Monster Strike, released by the Japanese social network company Mixi in 2013, was a huge hit; Inside Games later called Okamoto its creator, and in 2015, still president of Game Republic, he talked to Famitsu about it. Its success, he said, had matched the middle of three forecasts he had made before launch. He warned against copying it: “People won’t spend their precious time on games that are merely imitations.”
By 2023 he was running a game company from Johor Bahru in Malaysia and talking about his career on YouTube, where in 2021 he explained why Resident Evil 0 went to the GameCube: Capcom, he said, spread its big games across rival consoles so that a single failure could not sink the company. He also runs a foundation that supports young Japanese game developers.
Sources
- Atsuo Nakayama, interview with Yoshiki Okamoto, Denfaminicogamer, 14 February 2023 (web, secondary; in Japanese, quoted in translation): joining Konami in 1981; the driving-school order and Time Pilot; “You’re fired!”; pay and leaving Konami; Tsujimoto’s promise, Capcom’s seven staff and joining at 22; 1942’s American heroes; Game Republic’s debts and Monster Strike; Malaysia and YouTube. https://news.denfaminicogamer.jp/kikakuthetower/230214e
- Wikipedia (Japanese), “岡本吉起”, as mirrored by eiga.com (web, secondary): birth date and place, Konami from 1981, Capcom board posts, Flagship, leaving Capcom in 2003. https://eiga.com/person/22649/wikipedia/
- Edge issue 181, November 2007, p. 17: interview with Okamoto (“the driving force behind Gyruss, Time Pilot, 1942”; Folklore).
- Retro Gamer: The Ultimate Retro Companion, volume 2 (Imagine Publishing, 2008), pp. 137–138: Okamoto “jettisoned by Konami”, joining Capcom in 1984, 1942’s “instant upturn in fortunes”, Final Fight.
- Retro Gamer issue 18, 2005, p. 63: Capcom’s early hits traced to Fujiwara and Okamoto.
- “The making of… Street Fighter II”, Edge issue 108, March 2002, pp. 100–105: Noritaka Funamizu as producer, Akira Yasuda and Akira Nishitani as planners.
- Edge issue 73, July 1999, p. 21: Flagship, “owned by Okamoto-san, the producer of Street Fighter II”.
- Edge issue 84, May 2000, p. 33: Eldorado Gate and Okamoto’s scripts.
- Edge issue 99, July 2001, p. 8: Okamoto, Capcom’s managing director, announces Capcom’s Xbox support.
- Edge issue 119, January 2003, p. 110: Okamoto as Capcom’s chief operating officer.
- Edge issue 150, June 2005, p. 41: Genji preview (a PS2 game), Okamoto on Game Republic and Capcom.
- Edge issue 211, February 2010, pp. 61–66: “On the Shoulders of Giants” (Game Republic’s 300 staff and three sites; Genji: Days of the Blade and the PS3 launch; Folklore; Clash of the Titans and Majin; Okamoto on sequels and overseas markets; “spiritual father of Street Fighter II”).
- In-game credits of the Saturn and Dreamcast versions of Mega Man 8, Mega Man X4, Marvel vs. Capcom, Power Stone, Street Fighter Zero 3, Super Puzzle Fighter II Turbo, Resident Evil 2 and Dino Crisis, as transcribed by Sega Retro (web, secondary). https://segaretro.org/
- Brian Ashcraft, “Japanese dev legend goes from riches to rags”, Kotaku, 2 June 2011 (web, secondary): head of R&D at Capcom over Street Fighter II and Resident Evil; leaving Capcom in 2003 to found Game Republic; the closed Osaka and Nagoya branches. https://kotaku.com/japanese-dev-legend-goes-from-riches-to-rags-5807708
- “岡本吉起氏が設立した「ゲームリパブリック」東京地裁から破産開始決定を受ける”, Game*Spark, 17 June 2026, and GameBusiness.jp, 18 June 2026, both reporting Tokyo Shoko Research (web, secondary; in Japanese): dormant since 2013; bankruptcy proceedings opened on 10 June 2026; the Japan Game Culture Promotion Foundation. https://www.gamespark.jp/article/2026/06/17/168100.html
- Famitsu, interview with Yoshiki Okamoto on Monster Strike, 9 April 2015 (web, secondary; in Japanese, quoted in translation). https://www.famitsu.com/news/201504/09076351.html
- Inside Games, 14 May 2021 (web, secondary; in Japanese): Okamoto’s YouTube account of Resident Evil 0 and the GameCube. https://www.inside-games.jp/article/2021/05/14/132306.html