artist
Akira Yasuda
安田朗
Praise from other people is important, he says. Being able to accept your own work is the one that decides.
About
Akira Yasuda, known as Akiman, is a Japanese character designer and illustrator. He joined Capcom answering an advertisement for commercial illustration work, drew maps for Side Arms, and moved into planning and character design on Final Fight and the Street Fighter series, where he designed Chun-Li. After Street Fighter he was moved off the field to supervise graphics company-wide, worked on Turn A Gundam and Red Dead Revolver, then left Capcom and went freelance in Tokyo. He now works on illustration, character and mechanical design across games and print.
History
Akira Yasuda answered a job advertisement for someone to draw illustrations for commercials. The company turned out to make video games, and the man who interviewed him was Yoshiki Okamoto. He drew as an illustrator for a while, then was handed the maps for the shooting game Side Arms. The people everyone in the building looked up to were the planners, so one day, standing beside Okamoto in the bathroom, he asked to be made one. Okamoto told him yes — once he had built more experience.
Final Fight looked expensive, and it had not taken much time. It became, he says, Capcom’s best-selling game of the moment, and that result put Yasuda and Nishitani on Street Fighter II. The characters there were large enough that someone had to draw them first. Until then, he says, it was not unusual to program a character straight into the machine with no base drawing at all.
Everyone brought character designs and the team chose among them. His first Chun-Li wore trousers; he had reasoned that trousers were the sensible thing for a woman who fights with her legs. Design is not illustration. Design is the act of turning a plan into a drawing, so his own taste and whatever was fashionable that year stayed outside the room.
After Street Fighter his superior asked him to retire from the field. It was a promotion: he would supervise all the graphics. The company broke up the team that had made the hit so that each member would carry what they knew into the rest of the company. By the time of Street Fighter III he wanted a reset, and without one, he thought, it could be the end of Akiman.
Later he went to the United States to work on Red Dead Revolver. He did not want to go, and went because the company had let him work on Turn A Gundam and he felt he owed it. He came home, left Capcom, told nobody, announced it on his blog, called a moving company and moved to Tokyo. He asked for work on the blog. At first it was terrifying.
Then he stopped liking games. Fifteen years of it, and he traces it to the American job. Around June 2016 he saw the newly released Overwatch, felt he simply had to play it, and played every day.
Also connected to
- Yoshiki Okamoto co-created Street Fighter II: The World Warrior / co-created Fighting Street
- Yoko Shimomura co-created Street Fighter II: The World Warrior