Isao Takahashi

"Taking charge of scenery, simply put, means everything you see in the game, so it means having what is relatively the biggest part to oversee. In the case of art direction, it doesn't stop with "portraying" things, like modelling the characters and their movements, but you also have to include how objects move."

- Isao Takahashi

Isao Takahashi is a director, producer, programmer, and artist in the video game industry. He was a member of Team Silent, serving as a background designer and artist on Silent Hill. He was one of the several Team Silent members who left after the first game alongside Keiichiro Toyama and Naoko Sato to establish Project Siren. He was the art director of the Forbidden Siren series.

Biography
In the 1990s, Konami created Team Silent to develop the original Silent Hill game in the hopes of creating a horror title that would be successful in the United States. Isao Takahashi transferred to the team from the TV and movie advertising industry. He served as an artist and background designer who worked on the scenery of the game, developing many of the outdoor assets of the Otherworld segments such as the alleyway sequence in the opening scene. The art design in his horror projects often involves lowering the saturation and using lower toned colors.

When he joined the team, he and background/creature designer Masahiro Ito learned that they shared a fondness for the film Jacob's Ladder, which Takahashi took inspiration from in his work. There was reportedly a heated discussion over the size and realism of Lisa Garland's legs between him and Naoko Sato soon after he joined.

After the release of Silent Hill, several former Team Silent members branched off with Keiichiro Toyama and Sato to establish a more Japanese-styled horror series with the Forbidden Siren games. Takahashi was a late-addition, and worked as the series' art director. He has done various other work for developers such as Capcom, Sony Interactive Entertainment, and again for Konami, including art direction, producing, programming, and designing. Some of his notable work includes the Kirby series, Knack II, the Gravity Rush series, Godzilla, Mothra and King Ghidorah: Giant Monsters All-Out Attack, and Resident Evil: The Darkside Chronicles.