Yoshio Sakamoto
Yoshio Sakamoto is a game designer at Nintendo who was the manager of the company's R&D1 studio and is known as one of the central figures behind the Metroid series of games.
He was hired by Nintendo in 1982 right after graduating from art college. He was first recruited by Shigeru Miyamoto to help design the arcade game Donkey Kong Jr., but the next year turned to create console games for the Nintendo Entertainment System. He worked as a game designer on the NES games Kid Icarus and as director on Metroid (both 1986), and directed the Game Boy title Balloon Kid (1990).
In addition the original Metroid, he has directed Super Metroid (1994), Metroid Fusion (2002), and Metroid: Zero Mission (2004); all Metroid games produced internally by Nintendo except Metroid II: Return of Samus. He also supervised the production of Retro Studios's Metroid Prime (2002) and Metroid Prime 2: Echoes (2004).
He also worked on Teleroboxer (1995), Galactic Pinball (1995), Game & Watch Gallery (1997), Wario Land 4 (2001), Super Smash Bros. Melee (2001), Balloon Flight (2002), Wario World (2003) and WarioWare, Inc. (2003).
Sakamoto grew up with Nintendo toys, which he considered "sometimes strange" but "different all the time". He has stated the he wants to live up to public expectations of Nintendo to deliver unique products, describing Wario Ware as a "typical example" thereof. Regarding his professional relatationship with Shigeru Miyamoto, he believes his own mission not to be competiting but to "always come up with something very different from what Mr Miyamoto is likely to do".