Rieko Kodama (Japanese: 小玉 理恵子, Hepburn: Kodama Rieko; May 1963 – May 9, 2022), also known as Phoenix Rie, was a Japanese video game artist, director, and producer employed by Sega from 1984 until her death. She is primarily known for her work on role-playing video games including the original Phantasy Star series, the 7th Dragon series, and Skies of Arcadia (2000). She is often recognized as one of the first successful women in the video game industry.

Kodama began her career at Sega as a graphic designer on arcade games and Master System games, including Alex Kidd in Miracle World (1986) and Phantasy Star (1987). The success of Phantasy Star led her to continue with the series thereafter, including directing Phantasy Star IV: The End of the Millennium (1993) for the Sega Genesis. She did artwork for other Genesis games, including Altered Beast (1988) and Sonic the Hedgehog (1991). Later, as producer, she oversaw the development of several Sega video games, including the critically successful Skies of Arcadia. Kodama remained a producer at Sega until her death. She received the Pioneer Award at the 2018 Game Developers Choice Awards in recognition of her lifelong contributions to video games.

Rieko Kodama was born in Yokosuka, Kanagawa, Japan, in May 1963. She enjoyed playing arcade games as a child. In high school, Kodama was interested in designing advertising materials. After entering college, she felt indecisive between pursuing studies in art or archaeology, since she carried an interest in Egyptology. In her indecisiveness, she failed in all of her classes. She remembered her original interest in advertising and decided to dedicate herself fully to her art passion, enrolling in an advertising design program at a trade school. She grew an interest in graphic design and wanted to pursue doing her own work rather than trumpeting works of others as in the advertising business. The video game industry caught her attention as an emerging field. Home game consoles were new as most of the industry was still in the arcade field. The industry piqued Kodama's curiosity as she rarely went to the arcades and felt her unfamiliarity with the medium would make it a good way to challenge herself.

Kodama was hired by Sega in 1984 through one of her colleagues who was already employed there. She originally thought she was going to be working on advertising and graphic design, but after seeing the game development department, she felt that would be fun as well. She learned how to create graphics from Yoshiki Kawasaki, the sprite artist behind Flicky (1984). Her first job was as character designer for the arcade game Champion Boxing (1984). She continued to work on other arcade games such as Sega Ninja (1984). Because development times were short and Sega was low on design staff, Kodama would sometimes work on five to six games at once. She designed the art for Alex Kidd in Miracle World (1986) for the Master System, was "deeply involved" with the arcade and Master System versions of Quartet (1986), and created art for the Master System port of Fantasy Zone II: The Tears of Opa-Opa (1987). Kodama received small requests to design assets for other projects on a daily basis, such as the dragon from Miracle Warriors: Seal of the Dark Lord (1987) and an enemy for the SG-1000 port for The Black Onyx (1987). Kodama served as editor for the Japanese Sega newsletter Sega Players Enjoy Club (SPEC).

Kodama credited herself as "Phoenix Rie", "Phenix Rie" [sic], or some close variation in many of her early works. This was because at the time Sega did not allow developers to place their real names in their games. The pseudonym was based on the manga character Phoenix Ikki from Saint Seiya.

With the popularity of Enix's Dragon Quest role-playing game (RPG) series on the Famicom in the mid-1980s, Sega formed a team of several people to develop a competing RPG for the Master System, titled Phantasy Star (1987). Kodama served as the main artist for the game, designing the characters, the 2D environments, the battle screen backgrounds, non-playable characters, and other details. Star Wars was one of Kodama's favorite film series and was a significant inspiration for her when designing artwork for Phantasy Star. She enjoyed the way Star Wars took elements from Japanese and Asian culture and infused it with a science fiction setting. Following this notion, she gave the science fiction world of Phantasy Star a Western folklore feel and gave the characters medieval clothes.

One of the key design philosophies for Phantasy Star was to do things differently from existing RPGs, particularly the Dragon Quest series which she believed was too simple and pure of a fantasy world. One such challenge to differentiate Phantasy Star was to create a female hero. The female protagonist Alis, and another character, Lutz, were designed by Kodama. Other characters, as well as the game's monsters, were designed by other people. In the original story drafts, Lutz was written as intersex, and could become either male or female later in the game. She thought this was interesting, so chose to give Lutz an androgynous appearance in the final game. In this game and later Phantasy Star games, Kodama enjoyed creating a cast of characters uniting for a common purpose, regardless of gender, species, or home planet.

Phantasy Star was a critical and commercial success and a benchmark title for both the industry and the RPG genre. In later years, Kodama continued her work on the Phantasy Star series. She again led the graphic design for Phantasy Star II (1989) and later directed Phantasy Star IV: The End of the Millennium (1993). She helped during the planning stages of Phantasy Star III: Generations of Doom (1990). She also supervised the development of two Phantasy Star Collection compilations as well as remakes of Phantasy Star and Phantasy Star II for the PlayStation 2.