When young game designer Yoshitaka Murayama walked into his boss’s office at Konami in the early Nineties, he planned to pitch a game inspired by popular football manga, Captain Tsubasa. He loved the way that series used its huge, memorable cast of supporting characters to create depth and breadth beyond what a single character can accomplish. Murayama knew, however, that his boss disliked manga, so, instead, he conjured a more palatable comparable for the game he wanted to make: Shi Nai’an’s classic Ming Dynasty novel Water Margin. Or, as it’s known in Japanese, Suikoden.
Murayama charged into the meeting full of enthusiasm, but, to his chagrin, pitched the idea too well. “[My boss] asked me what kind of story it was going to be,” Murayama explained in a 1999 interview…
