Junya Ota (太田 順也) known professionally under his alias ZUN, is most known for being the creator of the Touhou Project video game series. He is also known for composing a huge majority of the Touhou Eurobeat songs, and working with several Doujin Eurobeat labels.
Background[]
*Note:Taken from his Wikipedia page.
ZUN's first interest in developing video games came during his high school years. While most shoot 'em up games utilise a military or science fiction theme, ZUN wanted a game with a miko main character and a Shinto aesthetic. ZUN was part of his school's orchestra club, and originally wanted to create music for video games. As he did not know anybody else who was making games that he could put his music in, he made his own games for this purpose. Around 2001, he applied to Comiket as a music group under the name of Shanghai Alice Ensemble, but was rejected.
ZUN attended Tokyo Denki University, where he majored in mathematics. It was during university that he created the first Touhou game, Highly Responsive to Prayers. The first five Touhou games were developed for the PC-9800 series of computers, of which ZUN owned the PC-9821 model.
After university, ZUN worked as a programmer at Taito from 1998 to 2007. He got the position by showing his interviewer the Touhou games he had created, after which, he was hired immediately. During his career at Taito, ZUN helped work on Greatest Striker, Magic Pengel: The Quest for Color, Bujingai, Graffiti Kingdom and Exit, as well as some other games that were ultimately cancelled. He left as he did not enjoy working at the company, and Touhou was already successful enough for him to make a living from it. However, he did not initially plan for Touhou to become his life work.
In 2010, the Guinness World Records called Touhou Project "the most prolific fan-based shooter series" ever created.
Composition Credits[]
TBA