Kaz Ayabe

Kazuhiro Ayabe (綾部 和弘) is a Japanese video game developer. He is the founder of the video game company Millennium Kitchen and the creator of the video game series Boku no Natsuyasumi.

Biography
Ayabe was born in 1965 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. 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.

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, and was a finalist for the Excellence Award at the third Japan Media Arts Festival. Since then, Boku no Natsuyasumi 2 (2002) and Bokura no Kazoku (2005) were selected as juror-recommended works at the Japan Media Arts Festival, 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.

Since 2014, Ayabe has been the proprietor of Mars Curry, a Japanese curry restaurant located in Ikebukuro, Tokyo.