Kenichi Nishi

Early Career

Kenichi original got his start at Telenet Japan's subsidiary studio, Riot, working on RPG titles Exile, Tenshi no Uta, and Psycho Dream. He soon left to work at Squaresoft and ended up working on Chrono Trigger and Super Mario RPG: Legend of the Seven Stars in respect to their field plan and map data coordination.

All Out of Love

In 1995, Kenichi and several other Squaresoft employees left and formed Love-de-Lic Inc, named after Ken's favorite album from Yellow Magic Orchestra, Technodelic. The studio went on to make three games, two of which Ken directed: Moon: Remix RPG Adventure and L.O.L.: Lack of Love.

While working at Love-de-Lic, Ken worked on two outside projects that were released in 1999: WARP's D2 and Polygon Magic's Incredible Crisis. It's important to note that while Ken did not work for Polygon Magic, he was behind both the story and the design concept for the game.

Skipping Ahead

After L.O.L.'s 2000 release, the studio disbanded leading members to eventually create their own studios, including Vanpool, Punchline, and skip Ltd, the later which Kenichi co-Founded. He started by working on game design and direction for GiFTPiA and in 2003, began working on Chibi-Robo!, but the project was stalled after two years. Once Shigeru Miyamoto learned of the project, he worked alongside Ken for another eight months until the project was finished. It's due to this project that skip Ltd. is currently a second party developer studio for Nintendo.

Another New Venture

On February 23, 2006, Kenichi founded yet another studio, Route24, citing that he felt that when it came to designing games, working with large groups of people on large projects seriously limited his creative freedom. Since the studio's start, Ken has worked on designing LOL for the DS, newtonica, newtonica2, Takurou Morinaga DS, and PostPet DS.

While he does not work directly for skip Ltd. anymore, Ken has still done some design and story work for since his departure, including Captain Rainbow, and several Route24 titles have been published by skip as well. In addition to involvement with skip, Ken has also worked on design for Tabot's Wacky World of Sports for the Wii and supported Vivarium on Odama.

Miscellaneous

• Many of the games Kenichi has worked on include appearances of his dog Tao. His beloved canine is found in Moon: Remix RPG, GiFTPiA, L.O.L.: Lack of Love, Chibi-Robo!, and Captain Rainbow. In October of 2009, Tao passed away due to complications with his kidneys.
• Ken is very environmentally conscious, and this is reflected both in Chibi-Robo the character and the GameCube game.
• One of Ken's favorite games is Dragon Quest III.
• Ken also has a love for British Rock music.