Kotaro Hayashida
Kotaro Hayashida (小太郎林田 "Kotarō Hayashida"), also known by the pseudonym "Ossale Kohta" (オサール・コウタ), is a Japanese video game designer best known for his work at Sega, which he joined in 1983. He has worked on games such as "Alex Kidd in Miracle World" and "Phantasy Star". Career. In 1983, Hayashida, then a recent college graduate, saw a SEGA job advertisement in a magazine. He took the Shinkansen to Ōta, Tokyo, but got lost on the way to the main headquarters and ended up at one of Sega's factories instead. An employee gave him a lift to Sega 's headquarters, and following an interview he was given a job. He also had a scheduled interview with Namco, but chose to accept the job at Sega. When Hayashida joined Sega, the company had only just started developing video game consoles. As a result, the first game he worked on was an arcade game, the unreleased "Chain Pit". His first released game was "Hussle Chumy" for the SG-1000. After this he worked on numerous titles, including "Pitfall II", "My Hero" and "Ninja Princess". Hayashida had already completed 10 games when he began work on Alex Kidd in Miracle World in  1986. In the previous year Sega had split development into two divisions, one for arcade and the other for console. "Alex Kidd" was a product of the second development unit. At that time, "Super Mario Bros." had seen much success. Sega decided that in order to compete, it needed to create similar property for the Master System. He and his team therefore began development of an action game. After "Alex Kidd", Hayashida worked on "Phantasy Star" under the pseudonym "Ossale Kohta". He was the game's main planner. He continued to develop for Sega into the 90s, with his last  credit being the 32x port of "Space Harrier". After leaving Sega, he went on to work for the Japanese developer Game Arts. There he worked on "Grandia" for the PlayStation in 1999, and more recently "Bomberman Generation" on Gamecube.