Nippon Ichi Software has announced that their company president Tetsuhisa Seko has just passed away on January 24. He was 55 years old at the time of his death. Tetsuhisa Seko had worked at Nippon Ichi since March 2002, but he was mostly in charge of the company’s Business Content and Network Content divisions before he became the company president in 2023.

To learn how he became the company president, we should first look back to the departure of the Disgaea series creator and Nippon Ichi’s previous president Sohei Niikawa in August 2022. The company’s founder and chairman Koichi Kitazumi had also assumed the president spot since then. But in April 2023, Kitazumi expressed his desire to oversee a generational change to ensure the company’s sustainability. He therefore appointed Tetsuhisa Seko as the new company president in July 2023 so he could return to focus on his role as the chairman.

That means during Tetsuhisa Seko’s tenure as NIS’ president, we saw the company launching worldwide releases of Rhapsody: Marl Kingdom Chronicles and the currently still Japan-exclusive releases of Bar Stella Abyss and Disgaea 7 Complete; the latter of which would have added Asagi as DLC for existing players. The company is planning to release Phantom Brave: The Lost Hero worldwide and Cladun X3 for consoles in Japan. Unfortunately, Seko-san would not be there to oversee the new game releases.

The Japanese press release added that while the company now has one less board member due to Seko’s death, they still have enough members to fulfill the minimum limit in the Japanese regulation. It remains to be seen how the chairman Koichi Kitazumi will act to refill the now-vacant-again president slot in order to fulfill his regeneration vision.