Street Fighter Artist Akira “Akiman” Yasuda Talks Past, Future, and His Love for Overwatch

Giuseppe Nelva February 1, 2018 9:10 AM EST

Akira "Akiman" Yasuda, known as the most influential artist behind the Street Fighter series, talks about his early days, his career, and his renewed love for games.

The name “Akiman” is well known among fans of fighting games. Artist and Character Designer Akira Yasuda is one of the most hands in the creation of the peculiar art style of the Stret Fighter series and worked on many other games like Final Fight, Darkstalkers, Power Stone, Kikaioh, and more.

Today the Youtube channel Toco Toco TV released a brand new video interview with Yasuda, showing sides of him that many don’t know thanks to their usual intimate and nearly-poetic approach.

In the video, we hear how he started in the industry and how he ended up working in the United States on Red Dead Revolver, which ended up making him hate games. We learn about him leaving Capcom and going to hunt for freelance work in Tokyo, until he discovered Blizzard’s Overwatch, that made him love games again.

Now, I’m not in a position to say that Blizzard should have him design a character or a costume pack (or anything really) for Overwatch but… scratch that. I’m saying exactly that.

Personal pipe dreams aside, you can check out the video below. If you want to see more by the same team, you can enjoy more of these lovely videos on Yoshitaka Amano, Tetsuya Mizuguchi, SWERY, Goichi Suda, Daisuke Ishiwatari , Keiichiro Toyama, UME, Katsura Hashino, Yoko Taro and Kazutoshi Iida.