Call it a twist of fate or delicious irony, but game designer Keiji Inafune, a harbinger of the Japanese gaming industry's death, returned to Tokyo Game Show this year with one of the biggest games (as well as the biggest surprise) of the show.
"When Japanese folks noticed me at TGS," Inafune wrote on his blog, "they looked like they wanted to say something: Maybe, 'Death to Inafune!' or perhaps 'I'm a fan.' "
Inafune, famous for his work on "Mega-Man" and the George Romero-inspired "Dead Rising" zombie games, elicits such black-and-white responses because at a press event in 2009, the then-employee of Osaka-based Capcom said the Japanese game industry was "finished." The quote became infamous. After asking the assembled press what they thought of that year's TGS, he said, "Personally, when I looked at all the different games on the TGS floor, I thought 'Man, Japan is over. We're done. Our game industry is finished.' "