Kotaro Uchikoshi

Early years

Uchikoshi was born on November 17, 1973, in Higashimurayama, Tokyo. Almost immediately after birth, he began choking on amniotic fluid, and claims that had his doctor not dangled him upside down and hit his backside, he would have died. Uchikoshi was born with torticollis, which required surgery when he was three years old. While in middle school, he started reading gamebooks written by Steve Jackson, which instilled an early interest in narrative based games.

He studied management engineering in college, but dropped out and spent a year without a job. Uchikoshi then enrolled in the vocational school Vantan Design Institute, where he studied video game planning, 3D modelling, 2D art, sound, and programming. Vantan was founded as a school for clothes design, and only branched into game development later; according to Uchikoshi, the teachers were not well versed in video games, which led to uninteresting courses and many students dropping out. Eventually, only Uchikoshi and a few others attended classes, which resulted in the teachers being able to better focus and take care of the smaller group of students who still attended; because of this, Uchikoshi says that he and the other remaining students were able to achieve a higher level of proficiency.

Career

Uchikoshi's first job in game development was in 1998 when he joined KID, a company known for their bishōjo games. At the time, KID was also developing video game adaptations of board games; he originally joined KID because of these board game projects, as he was interested in making simple games that a lot of people would be able to enjoy. His first project at KID however was designing 3D models for the action game Pepsiman (1999). Sometime after the release of Pepsiman, a producer at KID asked him to write a scenario for an upcoming bishōjo game. Uchikoshi believes that the reason the producer choose him to be a scenario writer was because of his easygoing personality and experience writing design documents. The first bishōjo game he worked on was the visual novel Memories Off (1999), followed by Never 7: The End of Infinity and Memories Off 2nd (both 2000). While writing Never 7: The End of Infinity, Uchikoshi wanted to include science fiction themes, but was instructed by his superiors to instead focus on the relationships between the game's characters.

In 2001, Uchikoshi left KID to become a freelance writer and developer; this was the result of a need for independence, and the ability to work for other companies besides KID. Over the next few years, he worked on several games, including Close To: Inori no Oka (2001), Ever 17: The Out of Infinity (2002), and Remember 11: The Age of Infinity (2004). He also wrote two erotic visual novels, the first was a 2003 game which he was uncredited for and whose title he does not remember, and the second was Eve: New Generation (2006).

While working as a freelance writer, Uchikoshi was contacted by the game development company Chunsoft about a possible job offering. Looking to provide a stable income for his wife and daughter, he joined the company in 2007. Chunsoft had developed several mystery visual novels in the past, such as Banshee's Last Cry (1994), but wanted to create a new type of visual novel that could be received by a wider audience. Uchikoshi came up with the idea to include puzzles that are integrated within the story, and need to be solved in order for the player to make progress. Afterwards, he began implementing and expanding upon these ideas in Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors (2009), in which he served as the game director, planner, and scenario writer. Although the game was a commercial failure in Japan, its unexpected critical success in North America prompted Uchikoshi to continue the series.

The sequel to Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors was Zero Escape: Virtue's Last Reward (2012). In an attempt to reduce costs, Uchikoshi asked Chunsoft if he could develop Virtue's Last Reward and its eventual sequel simultaneously, as both games would use the same engine and digital assets; Chunsoft agreed to the proposal. Uchikoshi maintained his duties as the director, planner, and scenario writer. Despite positive reviews in the West, Virtue's Last Reward was another commercial failure in Japan. As a result, Chunsoft placed the game's sequel on indefinite hiatus, effectively ending the Zero Escape series. Uchikoshi examined the possibility of financing the development through the use of crowdfunding on a website like Kickstarter, but felt that the idea would not be persuasive enough for it to meet the goal.

After Virtue's Last Reward, Uchikoshi returned to freelance work. He wrote a scenario for Steins;Gate: Linear Bounded Phenogram (2013), before working on his first non-game related project, an anime series titled Punch Line (2015). Uchikoshi wrote the episode scripts, which he noted were more cinematic in tone than most of his previous projects. The series ran in Japan from April to June 2015. Uchikoshi also wrote a Punch Line manga, which began serialization in September, as well as a video game adaptation, released in 2016.

Meanwhile, fans of the Zero Escape series created an online campaign to raise awareness and support the development of a sequel to Virtue's Last Reward. Uchikoshi noted that the fan presence was a key factor for the sequel's reevaluation. While delivering the pitch for the game, he used a fan-made vocal rendition of the series theme song; Spike Chunsoft agreed to the proposal, and green-lit production on Zero Time Dilemma (2016). With Zero Time Dilemma, Uchikoshi intended to resolve all mysteries left from the previous two games in the series, as well as those introduced in the third. Following the game's release, he remarked that having devoted the last decade of his life to the series, he was saddened to see it finally come to an end. His next two projects were announced in 2017: the video game Project Psync, and the real escape room game The Pop Star's Room of Doom.

Writing style and philosophy

As a writer, Uchikoshi prioritizes storylines over characters, with the goal to write a story that people will remember regardless of the overall quality. He first writes the basic outline of a story. With plot twist heavy stories, he will typically work on the ending first and continue backwards, in order to not get confused when writing the plot. This method of writing, referred to by Uchikoshi as the "deductive composition method", was not used in his earlier works; Ever 17: The Out of Infinity was written using the "inductive composition method", where a setting is created first, and a story is created to support the setting, something he described as a gamble, with the risk of an uninteresting story. He also likes to work non-sequentially, writing multiple scenes in parallel.

After crafting a story, Uchikoshi attempts to create a balanced cast of characters, in terms of genders, personalities, and ages represented; to this extent, he used the Enneagram of Personality as a reference while creating the characters for Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors and Virtue's Last Reward. He purposefully does not give the main character of the story a strong personality, in order for the player to more easily empathize with them. Although the character dialogue is usually written with an international audience in mind, Uchikoshi will often write humorous and other important lines for a Japanese specific audience. This style of writing can be seen in Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors, as a vital plot point hinged on a Japanese pun, which forced the localization team to replay through the entire game again to determine if the story still made sense in English.

Uchikoshi believes that the most important aspect of writing visual novels is to envision what the player will think about in each scene, saying that he always has "a conversation with an imaginary player" when writing stories. Uchikoshi's works often deal with scientific and philosophical themes, including idealism, Rupert Sheldrake's theory of morphic resonance, and the prisoner's dilemma. When asked about these themes, he noted that he often has them in mind before writing a story, and collects web pages related to the topics. Once he has completed the final preparations for a story, he will choose which topics interest him and conduct further research. Among his influences include science fiction writers Isaac Asimov and Kurt Vonnegut. Uchikoshi believes ninety percent of any creative work consists of pieces from others' works, and that the remaining ten percent is creativity, with the result hinging on how well a writer can incorporate their influences with their own ideas.