SEGA Saturn game designer Kenji Eno died yesterday
Kenji Eno was always very anti-Sony and pro-SEGA back in the day. So much so that his franchises turned out to be exclusive and the man would go on a media rampage to put down Sony when he could. He is known for his horror SEGA Saturn titles like Enemy Zero and D (which later got a sequel on Dreamcast).
“I felt betrayed when Sony was treating me like that, so when I heard that the Sega vice president was a very interesting guy, he and I met and created this whole plot. My original conditions to make the game exclusive for Saturn involved my earlier story about supplying 1,000 Saturns for the blind people, and also to have Sega’s president appear onstage, personally, for the event. That was the original plot, and that was what was going to happen until the last minute, but he had a board meeting at Sega, and they were like, “OK, you’re actually appearing?” Like, Sega is a big, successful company, and a high-up management-level guy in that kind of company appearing in a situation like that isn’t good, so everybody stopped him. So he appeared in a video rather than in person.” – Kenji Eno tells 1up in a exclusive interview back in 2008.
Cause of death is said to be heart failure brought on by hypertension. Its funny how ahead of his time he was, one of his conditions to make his games exclusive to Saturn was for SEGA to give a 1,000 Saturn’s to blind people. He even created a game for them called ‘Real Sounds: Kaze No Regret‘ for the Saturn that was later re-released on Dreamcast.