Obituary: Bomberman dev and Hudson Soft vet Shoji Mizuno

Word is spreading today that Shoji Mizuno, a longtime game dev and Hudson Soft staffer best known for his work on the Bomberman franchise, has passed away.

It's unclear what happened, but on Monday morning a link to a blog post memorializing Mizuno's life and work was published by the Twitter account of former Hudson Soft executive and frontman Toshiyuki Takahashi (aka Takahashi Meijin, or Master Takahashi).

Mizuno spent decades as a game developer, and his list of credits stretches back to at least the early '90s. He's best known for his work as a character artist and art director on the Bomberman games, and in a (translated) Japanese-language interview published in 1998 he noted that "before I joined, [Bomberman's] design had more human-like proportions. I changed it to something a little more flexible."