Yoshihisa Kishimoto

Yoshihisa Kishimoto (岸本 良久, Kishimoto Yoshihisa, born September 17, 1961) is a Japanese video game developer known primarily for his involvement with Technos Japan Corp. He is best known as the original creator of the Kunio-kun and Double Dragon game franchises, having worked on the original arcade and NES installments in both series. He is currently the President and Representative Director of a game company called Plophet. He refers himself as the grandfather of the beat'em up genre.

Kishimoto began his video game designing career in the early 1980s after being employed by Data East, where he worked on the Laserdisc-based video games Cobra Command (also known as Thunder Storm) and Road Blaster. After leaving Data East, Kishimoto was employed by Technos Japan Corp. During his time on the company, he worked on the video games Nekketsu Kōha Kunio-kun (released in an altered form outside Japan under the title of Renegade) and Double Dragon. Both Kunio-kun and Double Dragon went on to become the main game franchises of Technos and helped established the side-scrolling beat-'em-up game genre (known as belt scroll action game genre in Japan).

After leaving Technos during the 1990s, Kishimoto worked as a freelance game designer and producer for various game companies while working under the trade name of Plophet. In 2000, he began working as a game developer for the "Plus e" platform, a computer terminal distributed to family restaurants in Japan. During his freelance career, he also acted as producer for budget games released in Japan, such as The Dungeon RPG for the PlayStation and Rogue: Hearts Dungeon for the PlayStation 2.

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