Profile
Profil (en français)
Interview published in AnimeLand #71 (May 2001)
Games he has worked on
Other video game related works
Gallery Part 1
Gallery Part 2
Gallery Part 3
Gallery Part 4
Gallery Part 5
On 29 September 2023, it was announced on Yoshitaka Tamaki's Twitter account that he had died on 13 July from lung cancer. He was 55.
An iconic illustrator of the 16-32bit period, he had worked on a number of flagship games and series of the 90s, from Shining Force to Feda, Landstalker and Alundra.
Mainly known to Japanese gamers or to fans of imported games, some of the titles he worked on nevertheless featured his illustrations in the West, including Alundra, Time Stalker and the two episodes of Shining Soul.
Born on 8 October 1967, Tamaki began drawing at an early age, taking inspiration from anime series such as the adaptation of Tetsujin 28, a robot series that was very popular with Japanese children at the time. He discovered video games early on through his technophile uncle, with whom he played TV Tennis, a console marketed by Epoch in 1975, before the first video game booms in Japan caused by the respective releases of Breakout/Block Kuzushi and Space Invaders.
At the end of secondary school, despite his father's firm opposition, he decided to take up an artistic career and took part in one of the annual video game design competitions organised by Enix since the early 1980s. From the age of 18, he began working with the publisher behind Dragon Quest on various computer games as a graphic and monster designer, but also occasionally as an illustrator, notably on Fangs (PC-88, 1991).
Some time after he started working on video games, on the advice of his childhood friend Hiroyuki Asada, he became an assistant to mangaka Kenichi Kotani, with whom Asada had himself worked as an assistant.
In the early 90s, some of the team behind Dragon Quest III and IV, including Kan Naito and Hiroyuki Takahashi, left to set up their own studio: Climax Entertainment. Takahashi, who was a member of the jury for the competition in which Tamaki took part, invited him to work on their future dungeon RPG: Shining and the Darkness (1991). Tamaki designed the game's characters and produced several illustrations for the Japanese version, which was one of the first big successes of the Mega Drive in Japan and Tamaki's first known game as an illustrator (it predates Fangs by a few months). At the same time, he drew a manga adaptation of the game published in Mega Drive Fan magazine (in which it is stated that he was an employee of Climax) and later in Climax's newsletter Climax Crew.
Tamaki continued his collaboration with Climax on two other flagship games for the Mega Drive: Shining Force and Landstalker (1992), which he co-wrote. The first game he directed was the tactical RPG Feda: The Emblem of Justice (1994), a Super Famicom game produced by Max Entertainment.
Max Entertainment was a subsidiary of Climax Entertainment which, as well as having a name very similar to that of its parent company and bearing the same name as the main character in Shining Force, included a number of Climax employees who had already worked on their previous games, including Tamaki himself was an employee.
Still on the Super Famicom, he designed the characters for Lady Stalker (1995), the spiritual sequel to LandStalker, which did not meet with the same critical success. It was probably around this time that he went freelance again - he was no longer credited as an employee of Max Entertainment on Feda Remake! (1996) and Feda 2 (1997), and previously worked as illustrator on the aborted adaptation of The Elder Scroll: Arena (~1995) produced by Softbank for Saturn and PlayStation.
In 1997, he illustrated and designed the characters for Alundra, a PS1 game developed by Matrix Software, a studio founded in part by former members of Climax.
In addition to video games, he has occasionally illustrated books, including the Sora tobu! Ryūhō Gakuen series which began in 1993, as well as a book on orthodontic treatment. He also illustrated an Assault Suits Valken guide book in 1992, allowing him to venture further outside heroic fantasy territory (although he did design mecha for some of the aforementioned tactical RPGs).
In may 1999, Tamaki founded his own development studio - Salamander Factory -, which specialised mainly in subcontracting and worked on soundtracks as well as graphics, illustrations and chara design. He justified the creation of this company by his desire to collaborate with certain creators. However, he soon gave up his position as president of the company in order to be less consumed by the various administrative tasks involved in the job, and instead became managing director. Note that Tamaki already used Salamander Factory as the studio name in the early 90s in his manga Shining & the Darkness Gaiden.
In 2005, Hisayoshi Tamaki, presumably a relative of Yoshitaka, with whom he had worked on several games, founded Swallow Tails, a studio specialising in graphics, of which Yoshitaka was described as its main designer. It was through this studio that Yoshitaka Tamaki was credited on Spectrobes (2007) and Impetuth (2008) and it is likely that he was no longer an employee of Salamander Factory at this point.
While a sequel to Landstalker, once envisaged by Tamaki, never saw the light of day, he did have the opportunity to revisit the game's universe with the dungeon RPG Time Stalker, AKA Climax Landers (1999). In addition to a quickly aborted Landstalker 2: Heart of Diamond, the bounty-hunting elf should have reappeared on PSP or PS3 in a remake of the first opus, for which Kan Naito promised the return of the original development team. Alas, this remake was also cancelled, as was the tactical RPG Runebrid, announced for Xbox and billed as a spiritual successor to Shining Force thanks to its characters designed by Tamaki.
He hasn't always had the opportunity to continue his work on the series he helped create, be it Alundra or Shining Force, but he did make a return to the Shining series in 2002-2003 with the GBA diptych Shining Soul, 2 games for which he designed the characters.
In 2004, he took part in a project led by Sega to revive the Shining Force brand. 3 titles were announced. The first one: a remake of the first opus on GBA for which Tamaki redesigned his characters while 2 members of Salamander Factory took charge of the music. The second one, Shining Tears, was a PS2 game for which Tamaki designed monsters while Tony Taka designed and illustrated the characters. The third one, temporary called Shin Shining Force, became Shining Force Neo (2005), a game on which he held the same position as on Shining Tears.
However, although he continued to work on the Shining series for some time as well as games of lesser renown, from the mid-2000s onwards, his drawings and illustrations appeared less and less often in video games, with other illustrators taking over from him on the Shining series.
One of the last games he worked on as an illustrator was Impetuth, released on PC in 2008.
In 2023 though, a sign that he had remained popular with some gamers, he illustrated a bag for Beep Shop, using an aesthetic close to that of Feda.
I send my condolences to his family and friends.
Interviews:
Sega TV Game Genga Gallery (1994): several comments by Tamaki about his work on Landstalker, Shining Force, Shining and the Darkness
Sega Saturn Magazine - September 1995 - interview about Arena.
1997 interview about Alundra
Dreamcast Magazine - December 25, 1998
2001 interview about his career
2001 interview about Shining Soul: Dorimaga - October 26, 2001
2003 interview published on Sega's website (in Japanese)
Interview with Salamander Factory members Naofumi Tsuruyama, Takuya Hanaoka & Kayoko Matsushima
Profil (en français)
Interview published in AnimeLand #71 (May 2001)
Games he has worked on
Other video game related works
Gallery Part 1
Gallery Part 2
Gallery Part 3
Gallery Part 4
Gallery Part 5