Kenji Eno, creator of offbeat videogames such as D and Enemy Zero, passed away in Tokyo on Wednesday at the age of 42. The cause of death was heart failure, as confirmed on the website of fyto, the game developer of which Eno was president.

Born in 1970, Eno (whose last name would usually be transliterated as Iino) started his career in the game industry at a developer called Interlink, working on games for the Famicom, Japan's version of the Nintendo Entertainment System. Within a year, he left to form his own company EIM, which developed NES games like Panic Restaurant, Casino Kid II and an unreleased game based on Superman. An accomplished musician, Eno would often write the music for the games he designed.

But it was at the next game company he founded, Warp, that Eno would make a name for himself, designing creepy, sometimes shocking horror games, the most popular of which was D. Released early in the life of CD-ROM gaming systems like the 3DO, PlayStation and Sega Saturn, D made extensive use of full-motion video sequences to create its grotesque images. Eno later said in an interview with 1up that he deliberately misled the game's publisher to get his game manufactured with no censorship: He created a fake "clean" version of D, which he submitted late, knowing that meant he would have to personally fly the game's gold master disc to America for manufacturing. While on board the plane, he swapped the disc out for his uncensored version and handed it off.

That wasn't the only impish trick Eno pulled in his career. Angry at Sony for cutting the print run of the PlayStation version of D, he switched allegiances to then-rival Sega. But he announced this at a Sony event, showing a trailer for his next game Enemy Zero with a PlayStation logo that morphed into a Sega Saturn one in front of a crowd of confused onlookers.

After releasing a few games at Warp, Eno took a long break from game creation and from media appearances. He famously refused to give interviews for many years, finally breaking his silence in the aforementioned extensive talk with 1up's editors. By the late 2000's, Eno had returned to game design. He teamed with his friend, fellow indie creator Kenichi Nishi, to produce a series of puzzle games for the fledgling iOS platform called Newtonica. He later published a Wii downloadable game called You, Me and the Cubes with Nintendo, and another popular iPhone game called One-Dot Enemies.

Warp was where Fumito Ueda, the creator of the acclaimed games Ico and Shadow of the Colossus, got his start.

"My first entry into the world of videogames was at Kenji Eno's company Warp," Ueda wrote on Twitter. "Although I was only there for a brief one and a half years, it was an important experience that is still with me today. I regret that I was never able to properly thank him, and I am praying with all my heart for his happiness in the afterlife."

Around the release of You, Me and the Cubes, I found out that Eno was also, like me, a devotee of Japanese curry rice. After he read an article I wrote about it, he got in touch with me and said we should get curry in Tokyo. We ended up going to a department store near his office on a rainy day in 2009, bringing a bunch of curry back to his office and chatting about games.

I'd bought a copy of D for the closeout price of 50 yen (about 60 cents) that week, and asked him to sign it for me. This is what he handed back:

Photo: Jon Snyder/Wired

Eno's death is nothing short of a tragic loss for the game industry, which has lost one of its most inspirational independent creators, someone who was never afraid to torch bridges and build new ones to make exactly the kind of game he wanted to.

"Kenji Eno was indie back when nobody even knew indie was a thing you could do," wrote Blizzard senior producer Andrew Vestal on Twitter. "He did it anyway - what's more indie than that?"

Memorial services have been scheduled for February 24 and 25 in Tokyo.