Wii Fit designer leaves Nintendoâ?¦

Picture the scene: you’ve been working at Nintendo in Japan for 10 years. You’ve worked both as a programmer and as a designer on titles as ubiquitous as Wii Play and Wii Fit. So what do you do?

You quit the company in order to start a website dedicated to user-generated pictures of action figures, of course.

According to an article on ITmedia, Motoi Okayama, 33, is a self-confessed internet addict – "to the point where people wondered when I was able to sleep", he said – and was growing disillusioned with the fact that his job at Nintendo didn’t give him the opportunity to work with the internet.

"Thinking about my 10 years at Nintendo, I started to get impatient, that there were these things I wanted to do. The fact that I didn’t get to have an influence on the internet disappointed me. Nintendo has a very strong family-orientated brand, and I felt certain resistance to being able to start up any new online services.

"Nintendo doesn’t have any projects relating to the internet, and it’ll never pull out completely from packaged goods. It just seemed the next step."

The website, FG, was launched nine months ago, and now features 18,000 members. And it’s not the last he plans to create, either: "Because I’ve come late to the net business scene, I want to try all sorts of weird things, and keep on creating new services."