Kotaro Uchikoshi

Kotaro Uchikoshi (Japanese: 打越 鋼太郎, Hepburn: Uchikoshi Kōtarō), born November 17, 1973, is a Japanese video game director and scenario writer. He is known for co-writing the visual novel series Infinity with its director Takumi Nakazawa while working for KID, and directing and writing the visual novel adventure game series Zero Escape at Chunsoft.

Biography

Uchikoshi was born on November 17, 1973, in Higashimurayama, a city in the western part of the Tokyo Metropolis, Japan. He studied management engineering at university, but dropped out. He spent one year without a job, after which he joined the vocational school Vantan Design Institute, where he studied video game planning, 3D modelling, 2D art, sound, and programming. Vantan had started out as a school for clothes design, and only branched into video game development later; according to Uchikoshi, the level of the teachers wasn't very high because of this, leading to uninteresting courses and many students dropping out. Eventually, only Uchikoshi and a few others attended classes, which resulted in the teachers being able to better focus and taking care of the smaller group of students who still attended; because of this, Uchikoshi says that he and the other remaining students were able to achieve a higher level of proficiency.