Kaz Ayabe

Ayabe was born in 1965^[1] in Hokkaido as the youngest of three children. He was interested in design from a young age, developing a hobby of drawing maps of imaginary towns as a child, and eventually moved to Tokyo to study animation at Tokyo Designer Gakuin College.^[1] After graduating, he took a job as a graphic artist at the video game developer NMK, later becoming a programmer for the company. He worked on several titles for the company, including Psychic 5 (1987), Esper Boukentai (1987), and Rolan's Curse II (1992), before resigning from the company in the early 1990s. He worked as a freelancer for six months before being hired as a designer and project manager at K-Idea, a game design planning company founded by Shōnen Jump games columnist Hajime Kimura.^[2]

In 1997, Ayabe resigned from K-Idea to establish the game studio Millennium Kitchen. There, Ayabe would direct, write, and design the video game Boku no Natsuyasumi (2000), which won a New Wave Award at the fifth Japan Game Awards,^[3] and was a finalist for the Excellence Award at the third Japan Media Arts Festival.^[4] Since then, Boku no Natsuyasumi 2 (2002) and Bokura no Kazoku (2005) were selected as juror-recommended works at the Japan Media Arts Festival,^[5] and Attack of the Friday Monsters! A Tokyo Tale (2015) was selected as an honorable mention for Best Narrative at the Game Developers Choice Awards.^[6]

Since 2014, Ayabe has been the proprietor of "Kasei Curry" (Mars Curry), a Japanese curry restaurant located in Ikebukuro, Tokyo.^[7]