Shinya Kumazaki


Shinya Kumazaki is a Japanese video game director and game designer and HAL Laboratory employee who is the current director of the Kirby series overall.

Biography

Early life

Born in the Gifu Prefecture in 1979, Kumazaki studied at the Kanazawa College of Art and the Suidobata Fine Arts Academy.

Early work at HAL Laboratory

Kumazaki first joined HAL Laboratory in 2002, where some of his early roles included debugging the game and designer for Kirby Air Ride and Kirby Canvas Curse. His first game as director came in 2008 as the Nintendo DS remake Kirby Super Star Ultra where the original game was further expanded to include four additional sub-games.

As director

In 2010, he was working on the built-in software for the then-new Nintendo 3DS system when he was roped in to the development team the then unfinished Kirby Wii game; under his supervision the development team eventually managed to incorporate elements from the three unfinished concepts for the project and the game was finally released as Kirby's Return to Dream Land.
Since then, Kumazaki has helmed the role of Director and later, General Director for various main Kirby platformers, including Kirby's Dream Collection 20th anniversary compilation, Kirby Triple Deluxe, ' and Kirby Star Allies. In addition, he has worked on the drafts of the box comics of the BoxBoy! series games since 2016 and is the voice actor of King Dedede of the Kirby series, a callback to Masahiro Sakurai’s role as voice actor of King Dedede in '.
As general director of the Kirby series games, Kumazaki considers "devices, maps, and tough boss battles" the essential components of quality action games. Kumazaki is also well known within the Kirby fandom for incorporating lore and backstories of various characters and unifying the canon of the series through the pause screen descriptions of various bosses and interviews.

Personal life

Kumazaki used to own a pet cat by the name of Tom; he sampled the voice of Tom for the voice of the final boss of . The cat died in 2017.
Kumazaki also maintains his own personal blog and a public Instagram profile.

Works