Kenji Eno, famed game designer and composer, passed away yesterday from heart failure at the age of 42. Eno was truly a unique individual, both in terms of the games he worked on over the course of his more than two-decade-long career and the bold way he operated.
One of Eno’s first experiences with games was Space Invaders, which was quick to make an impression on him. “I liked how it made you feel kind of different. And the first time I experienced it, it’s like the first time you meet a woman — you feel something there; you feel some kind of chemistry,” he told 1UP in an extensive 2008 interview. “So I felt something like that for Space Invaders. That was probably love at first at sight. The sound was also what attracted me to it. Back then, I was in elementary school, and some schools banned kids from playing Space Invaders because kids were playing it too much.”