Shin Megami Tensei artist Kazuma Kaneko reveals he left Atlus 10 years ago to pursue mobile game development 

Last year, Japanese mobile game developer COLOPL announced that Atlus veteran Kazuma Kaneko had joined their ranks as of 2023. However, it wasn’t clear at what point Kaneko officially left Atlus or why he’d suddenly decided to step into the mobile game industry instead. In a recent interview with CGworld, the Shin Megami Tensei and Persona artist shed some light on his activities in the past few years. 

According to Kaneko, it’s been almost 10 years since he left Atlus. Before joining Colopl, he initially joined another game company he doesn’t name. Apparently, Kaneko struggled to get any projects off the ground while he was there. 

“To begin with, I don’t know much about other game companies. I was familiar with some of the major ones, but going to one of them was not an option I considered. That’s why I decided to use a job-hunting agency. Then, a few hours after I registered, I got a bunch of offers at once, and one of them was from Colopl.” Kaneko doesn’t explain why switching to another big game company wasn’t on his list, but he implies that he needed an environment where he could freely pursue his interest in mobile game development. 

“It’s already been around 20 years since then, but when I first saw the iPhone, I thought, ‘This is crazy’. It felt less like a phone and more like a portable PC. In fact, many PC games ended up being ported to it. It felt fundamentally different from the flip-phone games of the time.” Apparently, Kaneko had already formed an interest in mobile games at that point, but as he was working in the console game industry, he found it difficult to push his ideas. 

Moving to development for handheld consoles wasn’t “it” for Kaneko either, as he was eager to make games that use network connectivity and the latest technology of smartphones. “My previous company had titles that incorporated online features and tech, but I never got the chance to work on those projects. That’s part of why I was looking for an environment where I could actually do the kind of work I wanted to do.” 

After joining Colopl, Kaneko immediately got the opportunity to launch his own project, and he pitched Tsukuyomi: The Divine Hunter. The game (now out for PC, iOS and Android) started out as an RPG –a genre Kaneko is used to, but gradually evolved into a roguelike deckbuilder with generative AI elements as the rest of Colopl’s staff got involved.