Akira Kitamura

Akira Kitamura is an artist and video game director, creator of the character Mega Man. He worked on the first three games of the eponymous series as a planner and artist. He is also director of the game Cocoron released in 1991 only in Japan. He has often been credited under the pseudonyms Famicon Akira, or AK.

Career
Akira Kitamura worked as an artist and director of Mega Man, released in 1987 on NES. He created the original static sprite of Mega Man, to make sure it can be correctly distinguished from the game's wallpapers. Later, the artist Keiji Inafune creates a more refined illustration of the character. Inafune refers to this process as "a reverse character design" because the process of traditional is reversed, the artists first creating the artistic concepts that are then programmed into game graphics.

During a special event at the Tokyo Game Show in 2007, Inafune comments on his role and that of Kitamura in the creation of the character. "I'm often called the father of Mega Man, but in fact, his design was already created when I joined Capcom. [...] My mentor (Akira Kitamura), who was the designer of the original Mega Man, had a basic concept of what the character should look like, so I only did half the work to create it. " he declared [8]. Kitamura also worked on Mega Man 2 as a director of the game, and left Capcom during the development of Mega Man 3 [3]. He joined the game developer Takeru where he led the development of the game called Cocoron, with some similarities with Mega Man. He is also working on the design of Little Samson.

In the early 1990s, Kitamura retired from the game development business.