Rieko Kodama

Life

Rieko Kodama was born in May 1963 in Yokosuka, Kanagawa Prefecture; sources differ on the exact day. She liked arcade games as a child, and in high school she was drawn to designing advertising. At college she wavered between art and archaeology, fascinated by Egyptology, and her indecision cost her every class. Remembering her first love, she enrolled in an advertising design program at a trade school, where graphic design took hold of her, along with a wish to make her own work rather than promote other people's. The new video game industry appealed precisely because it was unfamiliar to her; she seldom went to arcades and saw games as a challenge.

Work

A colleague already at Sega brought her into the company in 1984. She expected to work in advertising, but the game development department looked like more fun. She learned sprite art from Yoshiki Kawasaki, the artist of Flicky, and her first assignment was character design for the arcade game Champion Boxing (1984). Because Sega's design staff was small, she sometimes worked on five or six games at once, drawing the art for Alex Kidd in Miracle World (1986) on the Master System, working on Quartet, and taking a stream of small requests, among them the dragon of Miracle Warriors and an enemy for the SG-1000 port of The Black Onyx. Sega did not then allow developers' real names in credits, so she signed her work "Phoenix Rie."

When Enix's Dragon Quest became a phenomenon, Sega assembled a small team to build a rival role-playing game for the Master System. On Phantasy Star (released December 20, 1987, two days after Final Fantasy) Kodama was the main artist, designing the characters, 2D environments, battle backgrounds and many details. A Star Wars fan, she loved how that saga infused science fiction with elements of Asian culture, and she reversed the formula, dressing a Science Fantasy star system of three planets in Western folklore and medieval costume. The team wanted to do things differently from Dragon Quest, which Kodama thought too simple and pure a fantasy, and one way was the hero: Alis, a young woman avenging her brother, whom Kodama designed along with the androgynous Lutz. She later said she enjoyed creating casts united by a common purpose regardless of gender, species or home planet.

Phantasy Star was a critical and commercial success, and Kodama stayed with the series. She again led the graphic design of Phantasy Star II (1989), helped plan Phantasy Star III (1990), and directed Phantasy Star IV: The End of the Millennium (1993) for the Genesis, often praised as one of the finest RPGs of the 16-bit era. Along the way she drew for many other Sega games, from Altered Beast (1988) to Sonic the Hedgehog (1991) and its sequel. She directed Magic Knight Rayearth (1995) for the Saturn, involved in everything down to sales and marketing, then became a producer in the Sega Wow division and led Skies of Arcadia (2000) for the Dreamcast, a buoyant 3D RPG of sky pirates that she ranked, with Phantasy Star, among her favorite projects. She insisted that it not lean on the CGI movies then fashionable, which she felt took control away from players. Later she produced educational games, the 7th Dragon RPG series for Nintendo DS, PSP and 3DS, and, from 2018, the Sega Ages line of classic re-releases.

Legacy

Nintendo Power called Kodama the "First Lady of RPGs," and she is often recognized as one of the first successful women in the game industry. She was frequently asked about women in games; she believed more girls would enter the industry as they grew up playing RPGs, and while she did not design specifically for women, she avoided elements that treated them unfairly. At the 2019 Game Developers Choice Awards she received the Pioneer Award for a career spanning art, direction and production.

She loved Western fantasy. She played Dungeons & Dragons, read the Dragonlance novels and admired the wizard Raistlin Majere, and she enjoyed how Western fiction gave dragons individual personalities. Her favorite video game, she said, was Final Fantasy IV.

Kodama died on May 9, 2022. Sega initially made no announcement, out of respect for her family's privacy, and confirmed her death only after a memorial message appeared in the credits of the Sega Genesis Mini 2 in October 2022.