ZUN

ZUN is a Japanese independent game developer and composer best known for creating the Touhou Project, the long-running bullet hell shoot 'em up series he has built almost entirely alone. His real name is Jun'ya Ōta; he releases his games under the one-man doujin circle Team Shanghai Alice.

Born in 1977 in Hakuba, Nagano, ZUN grew up playing arcade games at the local ski resorts and composing music on an Electone his parents gave him. He studied mathematics at Tokyo Denki University, where he wanted to write music for fighting games. Because he knew no one making games to put his music in, he made his own: the first Touhou game, Highly Responsive to Prayers, came out on the NEC PC-98 through a student game club, and the second, Story of Eastern Wonderland, introduced the series' signature danmaku. He sold 80 copies of the first two games at Comiket in 1997 and was surprised when they all went.

After university ZUN spent several years as a developer at Taito while Touhou went quiet. He came back with Embodiment of Scarlet Devil for Windows at Comiket in 2002, which turned the series into a cult phenomenon. He left Taito in 2007 to work on Touhou full time. For the main games he does the programming, graphics and music himself, building each engine from scratch; fighting-game spin-offs are made with the circle Twilight Frontier.

Touhou's reach comes partly from ZUN's light-touch rules on fan works: creators can make doujin games, music, art and manga with few restrictions. Guinness World Records called it the most prolific fan-based shooter series in 2010. Since 2017 the games have also been sold on Steam, and the 20th mainline game, Fossilized Wonders, launched in August 2025.

In 2026 he announced Shanghai Alice Reprise, a new team he leads to bring older Touhou games to modern platforms. Its first release, a remake of Embodiment of Scarlet Devil called New Classic, came out on September 9, 2026 for PC, Nintendo Switch, Switch 2 and PlayStation 5, and is the first mainline Touhou game officially translated into other languages.