Video game designer and musician Kenji Eno has died of heart failure at the age of 42.
The designer behind the cult horror games in the D series, Eno started out in the video game industry at Interlink before going on to form his own development studio WARP in 1994, a studio where Fumito Ueda (later the acclaimed designer behind Ico and Shadow of the Colossus) worked as an animator.
Eno developed a maverick reputation during his time with WARP, as evidenced by a press conference for survival horror title Enemy Zero where Eno arranged the showing of the Sony PlayStation logo morphing into the Sega Saturn logo (the Saturn being the game’s eventual home) while Eno simultaneously announced a surprise deal with Sega, this being a public display of Eno’s anger towards Sony at the company’s mishandling of the release of his earlier game D.
Eventually, Eno moved away from the video game industry for several years only to return and create new games such as iPhone title One-Dot Enemies and Wii title You, Me, and the Cubes.
As well as game design, Eno worked as a musician on games as diverse as the Nintendo Entertainment System’s Casino Kid 2 and the Sega Dreamcast title Sega Rally 2. His fascination with music and sound led him to create the Saturn game Real Sound: Kaze no Regret, an adventure game developed with visually impaired players in mind, focusing on the use of sound rather than visuals to convey the gameplay experience.
[Via: Eurogamer]