Ayano Koshiro: a precociously talented graphic designer
Table of contents:
Part 1: A family of artists
Part 2: The Falcom years
Part 3: Transition to freelancing and amateur games
Part 4: The birth of Ancient
Part 5: The end of the 16-bit era
Part 6: Entering the era of 3D graphics
Part 7: Struggling projects
Part 8: Gradual departure from development
Sources
Games
Gallery
Article aussi disponible en VF
The history of video games is full of stories of developers who started out in the 80s, at an age when people don’t think too much about their professional future. In Japan, as elsewhere, the market for microcomputers was booming at the time, and it was not uncommon for young individuals, alone or in small groups, to develop and even market their own games. It was far less common, however, for women to be involved, as they were under-represented in this industry, where many female graphic designers and musicians came to video games somewhat by chance after their studies and often ended their careers shortly after getting married.
Part 1: A family of artists
My favorite thing is monsters
Ayano Koshiro was born on April 16, 1970 into a family where choosing an artistic path was presumably not a source of contention. Her father was a painter and her mother a pianist, and she lived with her brother, three years her senior, who had also trained in music. The story is well known: their mother, Tomo Koshiro, gave piano lessons to the wife of Joe Hisaishi, the not yet famous composer who in turn became the private teacher of the first of the siblings, then aged 7.
Yuzo, an avid manga reader, introduced his sister to the latest releases, as well as older works by mangaka Shigeru Mizuki. A major post-war author, Mizuki made his name mainly with stories about fantastic creatures from Japanese folklore – the yōkai – including Gegege no Kitaro and NonNonBa. Ayano was only 8 at the time of her discovery, but she became a great fan of the artist and discovered a passion for monsters along the way.
Sekai no Yōkai Zen Yakka, an encyclopaedia of monsters illustrated by numerous artists, was published in 1981 and served as Ayano Koshiro’s bedside book. Before that, another encyclopaedia called Ultra Kaiju Dai Hyakka had already been published, which her husband said she also read.
The video game market was still in its infancy in Japan at the end of the 70s. The arcade scene, where video games and electro-mechanical games coexisted, experienced its first two video game booms with the release of Breakout/Block Kuzushi (1976) and, more importantly, Space Invaders two years later. In homes, some consoles produced by Epoch, Bandai and Nintendo enjoyed relative success, while Sord launched the first personal computer on the local market in 1974, followed two years later by NEC.
It wasn’t until the early 1980s that the Koshiro family acquired a computer: a first-generation PC-8801 (1981), requested by Yuzo, who had been influenced by one of his school friends. Marketed as a hobbyist’s machine, the PC-8801 (or PC-88) went on to become the main gaming computer in Japan in the 1980s, with an impressive number of commercially available titles. The first games he bought were Donkey Kong 3 (released in October 1984) and Swashbuckler (1985), adapted from an arcade game and an Apple II game respectively (Note: it is likely that he purchased this computer well before these games were released. In 1991, he stated that he bought it when he started high school).
The magazines of the time were full of articles aimed at engineers, programmers and, little by little, gamers, with phenomenal quantities of lines of code printed in their pages that readers had to retype to try out or even modify the amateur games on offer. Many of these games were inspired by what could be found in game centers, places that Yuzo Koshiro frequented with his friends, sometimes bringing his sister along.
Ayano at 11, with her brother Yuzo and her father Takayoshi
Another activity that the Koshiro children engaged in during this period was drawing on computers, even if they didn’t necessarily do it on the same machine – Yuzo sometimes went to a recently opened shop to draw on a Fujitsu FM-7. While still in middle school, Ayano got her hands on a graphics software and, with the help of photos of games included in various magazines, she set about recreating visual elements of games such as The Tower of Druaga (1984), The Black Onyx (1984) and Gradius (1985). The machines on which some of these games ran had superior graphics capabilities to those of PC-88s, which could only display 8 colors simultaneously, making it all the more difficult for the apprentice graphic designer to reproduce. It was still just a hobby, but the possibility of turning it into a career gradually took root in her mind.
In addition to pixel art, she also dabbled in traditional drawing, always with a preference for non-human creatures. Once again, video games served as her inspiration, and she asked her brother to bring her all the promotional brochures he could find when he went to the AM Show (Amusement Machine Show) to use as references.
Dragon drawn in art class at school
The Moonstone
In December 1983, The Black Onyx was released on PC-88, to a degree of indifference that did not please its creator, Henk Rogers. With this title, he attempted to introduce the Japanese public to RPGs, a genre that was still little known in this country, where tabletop role-playing games were still in their infancy. Determined to boost sales of his game, he visited the editorial offices of several video game magazine to present it to them and explain how it worked. This gradually changed the fate of the title: magazines began to talk about The Black Onyx and a sequel was released a few months later in 1984, under the name The Fire Crystal.
In 1985-86, Rogers’ company – Bullet Proof Software – organised a pixel monster creation contest for the third episode of its series and distributed a graphics software via a magazine (presumably LOGiN). The Koshiros were familiar with Rogers’ series, as Yuzo himself was a player of the first instalment. His sister decided to enter the contest and won two prizes, including second place, which gave her the opportunity to collect her trophies at the Bullet Proof offices. This title could have been the first to feature her name; unfortunately, despite numerous delays, a change in the development team and at least one reboot, it was never released. However, as her brother pointed out, this contest probably motivated her to join the video game industry, which she soon did.
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