Shigefumi Hino (日野 重文Hino Shigefumi, born 1963) is a Japanese graphics designer, game director and planner from Nintendo. He is the creator of Yoshi from the Yoshi franchise.[1][2] Hino later served as the director of the Pikmin series, alongside Masamichi Abe.[3]
Career
Shigefumi Hino joined Nintendo in 1989, where his first project was designing a sequel to Famicom Grand Prix: F1 Race, which was ultimately unreleased. His first released product was Super Mario World in 1990, where he created the game's pixel art, as well as the character Yoshi, based on a rough sketch by Takashi Tezuka.[4] Afterwards, Hino had the idea for a game with Yoshi as the main character, which would become Yoshi's Island. He chose a hand-drawn visual style to differentiate it from Rare's Donkey Kong Country, a game that notably used pre-rendered 3D graphics.[4]
