If you’ve become a fan of Nippon Ichi Software’s work over the past decade, you definitely have Sohei Niikawa to thank for that. The president and CEO of the Gifu, Japan-based developer is also the producer and chief writer on nearly all of their most well-known games, including the Disgaea series and off-kilter PS1 classic Rhapsody: A Musical Adventure.
Being in this position had been Niikawa’s dream pretty much his whole life, although he wasn’t expecting it to turn out like this. “I applied for work [at NIS] as a game project planner,” he recalled in an interview published in this week’s Famitsu magazine. “I don’t know how to program, and I can’t draw or write music, so I really didn’t have any technical skills to show off. What I did have, though, was this intense, long-building desire to make games. NIS was only recruiting programmers and designers at the time, and I still wanted to go on as a planner, but in the end I wound up joining the company’s sales and PR division.”
