Yoshitaka Murayama

Yoshitaka Murayama
Born	Hokkaido, Japan
Nationality	Japanese
Occupation	Game designer, director and producer
Website	http://www.bm.ai/

Yoshitaka Murayama (村山 吉隆, Murayama Yoshitaka^?) is a Japanese game designer, game director and game producer. He is the creator of the Suikoden series of role-playing video games, which he produced and directed for Konami until his departure in 2002 before the release of Suikoden III.

After finishing his computer programming studies at University of Tokyo in the summer of 1992, Murayama visited Konami's newly opened Tokyo headquarters to submit his first job application whereupon he was hired. Initially hired for QA and menial tasks, he was handpicked six months later along with a few others to create his own launch game for an internally developed video game console, where he began collaborating with designer Junko Kawano, also a newcomer to Konami and future writer and designer for Suikoden IV and Suikoden Tactics. Tasked with writing an RPG and being fond of historical epics, Murayama composed an early version of the script for Suikoden II before the console project was scrapped. Murayama, Kawano and ten other employees were instead assigned with developing Konami's first games for Sony's upcoming console, the PlayStation. With the pick of making a baseball game, a racing game or an RPG, Murayama and Kawano decided to reopen their RPG project, although Murayama has stated that given the opportunity, he would have preferred to make a shoot 'em up, citing his preference for arcade action titles such as Taito's Metal Black.

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