Keiji Inafune

Keiji Inafune (稲船 敬二, Inafune Keiji; born 8 May 1965) is a Japanese video game producer, character designer, game designer, and businessman. In 2009, he was chosen by IGN as one of the top 100 game creators of all time.

Starting his career at Capcom in the late 1980s, his job was as an artist and illustrator. The first two games he worked on were the original Street Fighter and Mega Man in 1987. He was then a character designer and planner of the Mega Man series during the NES and Super NES era. For Mega Man X, he created and designed the character Zero.

Inafune then moved onto the position of producer with his first title being Mega Man 8 in 1996. In addition to being the producer for Mega Man X4, the three Mega Man Legends games, the Mega Man Zero series, the Mega Man Battle Network and Mega Man Star Force series and Mega Man ZX and Advent, Inafune was also a producer of the Lost Planet, Dead Rising and Onimusha series. In 2006, he was promoted to Senior Corporate Officer of Research & Development. In 2010, he became Global Head of Production at Capcom.

He left Capcom in late 2010, and later founded his own companies Comcept, and Intercept. He also became Representative Director of DiNG, a mobile game studio. Intercept worked on the game Kaio: King of Pirates which was announced in 2011 and cancelled in 2015. While at Comcept, Inafune oversaw work on such games as Mighty No. 9, Soul Sacrifice, and the unreleased Red Ash: The Indelible Legend. In 2017, Comcept was purchased and became a subsidiary of Level-5, becoming Level-5 Comcept. In March 2025, it was revealed that Inafune left Level-5 after 7 years in the company.

Inafune was born in Kishiwada, Osaka in 1965. He received a degree in graphic design in 1987 from the Osaka Designers' College.

Soon after graduating, the 22-year-old Inafune joined the Capcom corporation in 1987, in search of a job as an illustrator. Inafune had initially wanted to join Konami, but Capcom was much closer. In many early game credits at Capcom, he is credited under the name "INAFKING", which he got by combining the name "Snufkin" from the anime series Moomin with his own name. The first two titles Inafune worked on at Capcom was Mega Man (known in Japan as "Rockman") for the Famicom and the original Street Fighter for arcades, both of which were released in 1987. For Street Fighter, Inafune drew character portraits for the game.

For Mega Man, Inafune designed several minor enemy characters, and also designed the boss character "Elec Man", who was the first original game character that Inafune designed. Inafune had tried to design him as if he was a character an American comic series such as Spider-Man or X-Men. Inafune also drew the Japanese box art and promotional illustrations and worked on in-game animations and pixel art. Director Akira Kitamura created the original static pixel art sprite for Rock Man (later called "Mega Man" outside of Japan). This was to ensure that the sprite could be properly seen against the game's backgrounds, and could work in the game. After that, the pixel art was handed over to artist Inafune, who created a refined illustration of the character. Inafune refers to this process as "like a reverse character design" as it is the opposite of what typically occurs, where artists create concept art which is then translated into game's graphics. During a special event at TGS 2007, Inafune clarified his role in the creation of Mega Man.

I'm often called the father of Mega Man, but actually, his design was already created when I joined Capcom," he explained. "My mentor [Capcom senior member Akira Kitamura], who was the designer of the original Mega Man, had a basic concept of what Mega Man was supposed to look like. So I only did half of the job in creating him."