Akira “Akiman” Yasuda, best known as the character designer for various Street Fighter games, is featured in the latest episode of toco toco, where he talks about his start with Capcom and more on his career.
Watch the interview video below:
After a brief introduction, Akiman starts out by talking about how he got into the industry. It started with a job offer to create illustrations for commercials and advertising, which he thought that he could be able to draw once he got in; however, that was not the case. This company was a video game company.
However, the one who interviewed him was Yoshiki Okamoto, who Akiman felt was such an interesting person, so he decided to give it a shot, that and he didn’t have any money at the time. And that’s how he joined Capcom.
While Akira Yasuda is mostly known for his work on the Street Fighter series, during his time with Capcom from 1985 to 2003, he’s worked on a wide variety of titles including the original artwork for Marvel vs. Capcom, character designs for Power Stone, and he even worked at Angel Studios on Red Dead Revolver’s character designs before the developer was picked up by Rockstar Games’ parent company Take-Two Interactive.
Since leaving Capcom in 2003, Akiman has worked as freelancer and has worked as a mecha designer for anime such as Code Geass and Gundam Reconguista in G. He was also the character designer for Star Ocean: Integrity and Faithlessness.
After turning freelance, the former-Capcom illustrator and character designer started to hate video games. This is something he felt was likely provoked by his experience in the United States with Angel Studios. After 15 years these memories started to fade, and it wasn’t until June 2016 when he picked up the newly released game by Blizzard, Overwatch. He not only played it everyday, but was fascinated by various aspects of the shooter including its condensed levels, characters, and touch of humor. It made him think of it as an heir to Street Fighter.
Since then, the hate he had for games after turning freelance suddenly disappeared, after which he considered again to actively work in the video game industry.
If you’re interested in checking out more mini-documentary videos, they previously featured SWERY, Atlus’ Katsura Hashino, and Yoko Taro. There’s plenty more from other talented individuals from Japan that you can learn about via toco toco TV.
