Morio Kishimoto (岸本 守央) is a Japanese director, designer and game planner within Sonic Team. He did not start his video game career at Sega, but rather at Sammy overseeing their video game projects which were either 2D fighting games or conversions of pachislot and pachinko games. When Sammy merged with Sega, he found himself to be interested in joining Sega. Initially he wanted to work on arcade games, but was not interested in the direction of arcade games in Japan, since they were not focused on simple and traditional games with buttons and joysticks, like in the past. Sonic left a strong impression on him, therefore he wanted to join the division that makes Sonic. Soon he was in charge of Sonic and the Secret Rings, and rose through the ranks becoming a director.