Creator / Kotaro Uchikoshi

Kotaro Uchikoshi (打越 鋼太郎, born November 17, 1973) is a Japanese video game director and writer. Best known for the Infinity and Zero Escape series. His games tend to feature pervy, Ecchi humor as well as shocking, mind-bending Plot Twists that make you re-evaluate everything you've been through so far.

In 2001 he left KID (Kindle Imagine Develop), and joined Chunsoft in 2007. In 2017 he left Spike Chunsoft to form Too Kyo Games with Kazutaka Kodaka.

Works:

• Pepsiman (1999, 3D Model)
• Memories Off (1999)
• Infinity
  • Never 7 (2000)
  • Ever17 (2002)
  • Remember11 (2004)
  • 12Riven (2008)
• Zero Escape
  • Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors (2009)
  • Virtue's Last Reward (2013)
  • Zero Time Dilemma (2016)
• Steins;Gate (2013, "Abduction Across Three Worlds" scenario for Linear Bounded Phenogram)
• Punch Line (2016)
• The Girl In Twilight (2018)
• AI: The Somnium Files (2019)
  • AI: The Somnium Files - nirvanA Initiative (2022)
• World's End Club (2020)
• Tribe Nine (TBA)

Tropes common in Uchikoshi's works

• Double Entendre: Uchikoshi likes adding in covert (or sometimes overt, in his later works) sex jokes in his more casual scenes.
• Infodump: When it comes to introducing sci-fi concepts, Uchikoshi loves having (usually conspiracy-minded) characters infodump on real life scientific/pseudoscientific theories and urban legends. The delivery is usually generally simplified but also relatively dense in info, making the infodump feel like reading a Wikipedia article.
• Plot Twist: His most famous works are known for having deep plot twists running throughout the entire length of the story, up until their reveal. In some interviews, Uchikoshi even mentioned that he sometimes builds stories off of a plot twist, working all of the other story elements in from the twist.
• Meta Fiction: Specifically when it comes to plot twists, many of Uchikoshi's plot twists are built upon breaking player assumptions of video game story presentation.

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