Kenichi Nishi

Kenichi Nishi (西 健一) was born June 20, 1967 in Tokyo, Japan. Over the years, he has helped found a number of notable video game companies and currently develops games at Route24, his own private limited company. The number 24 in the title comes from its founder's name: "Ni" (2) and "Shi" (4).

Kenichi Nishi previously worked for both Telenet Japan and its subsidiary Riot. He was later hired by Squaresoft as a field designer for two of its larger releases, Chrono Trigger and Super Mario RPG.

After leaving Square in 1995, Nishi helped establish Love-de-Lic, Inc. with many of his former Square coworkers. There, he designed two of the small company's three game releases: Moon and Lack of Love. He also helped design and write the script for the 1999 Polygon Magic title Incredible Crisis.

Nishi then co-founded Skip. Ltd, a second-party developer for Nintendo. Acting as vice president of the company, he also directed Giftpia and co-directed Chibi-Robo. Shortly thereafter, he left Skip and founded Route24 on February 23, 2006. According to Nishi, he felt that working on large projects with a large group of people such as those at Skip limited his freedom in designing games.

At Route24, Nishi and a staff of four other people developed LOL for the Nintendo DS, which was published by Skip in 2007. He recently worked on Newtonica games for the iPhone and iPod Touch with Kenji Eno, and Takurou Morinaga DS for the Nintendo DS.

Nishi currently lives in Meguro, Tokyo. He is a fan of British rock music and once had a dog named Tao, who Nishi featured as a character in many of his games. Tao passed away in October 2009 due to kidney complications.