ZUN

ZUN's first interest in developing video games came during his high school years. ZUN was part of his school's orchestra club, and originally wanted to create music for video games. Around 2001, he applied to Comiket as a music group under the name of Shanghai Alice Ensemble, but was rejected.

His interest in creating music began in elementary school, when his parents gifted him an Electone as a birthday present. In junior high school, he played the trumpet in a brass band and began composing his own music.

ZUN attended Tokyo Denki University, where he majored in mathematics. He hoped to compose music for fighting games in college, since they were popular at the time due to Street Fighter II. As he did not know anybody else who was making games that he could put his music in, he made his own games for this purpose, which led to the first Touhou Project game, Highly Responsive to Prayers, being released in 1996 for the PC-98, developed under the generic circle name ZUN Soft and published by Amusement Makers, a student video game development club. The first game was originally intended as a practice in programming. The Touhou Project only became a shooting game series from the second game onwards, because the popularity of shooting games had revived due to RayForce and ZUN had long been a fan of such games. While most shoot 'em up games utilise a military or science fiction theme, ZUN wanted a game with a miko main character and a Shinto aesthetic, and started his own series with such. ZUN remarked how the general theme and direction of Touhou only started coming together in the sixth game, Embodiment of Scarlet Devil.

After the release of the fifth Touhou game Mystic Square, ZUN graduated from university and the series became inactive for four years. During this time, he worked at Taito as a game developer and also composed music for various games created by members of Amusement Makers. He got the position by showing his interviewer the Touhou games he had created, after which, he was hired immediately. During his career at Taito, ZUN helped work on Greatest Striker, Magic Pengel: The Quest for Color, Bujingai, Graffiti Kingdom and Exit, as well as some other games that were ultimately cancelled.

During this period, he contributed soundtracks to several games developed by his junior classmates in Amusement Makers, notably the Seihou Project (西方Project, Seihō Purojekuto; lit. "Western Project"), a series of bullet hell games for Microsoft Windows by Shunsatsu sare do? (瞬殺サレ道？). The series was intended as a counterpart to the Touhou Project, featuring highly similar gameplay as well as cameo appearances by Reimu Hakurei, Marisa Kirisame, and Yuuka Kazami:

Shuusou Gyoku (秋霜玉; lit. "Autumn Frost Orb", 2000) - part of the Seihou Project

Torte Le Magic (トルテルマジック, Torute Ru Majikku; 2001) - a bullet hell game by Pietoro (ぴえとろ) based on the manga 10 Carat Torte!

Kioh Gyoku (稀翁玉; lit. "Rare Venerable Orb", 2001) - part of the Seihou Project

ZUN's Strange Works (その他の作品; lit. "Other Works", 2000–2001) - a collection of six MIDI tracks for the Roland SC-88 Pro, including unused music from Shuusou Gyoku

ZUN became focused on game development for Microsoft Windows, forming the one-man dōjin circle Team Shanghai Alice and self-publishing all subsequent games. According to ZUN, the Windows games represent a "clean slate" for the series canon, albeit with many carry-overs and references from the PC-98 era.

In 2007, he left his job at Taito to focus on the development of the Touhou Project. Later that year, ZUN provided programming for Uwabami Breakers (黄昏酒場, Tasogare Sakaba; lit. "Twilight Bar Room"), a beer-themed bullet hell game published by "The Drinking Party" (呑んべぇ会, Nonbe-ekai). However, he did not initially plan for Touhou to become his life work.

While the Touhou games were initially created as a passion project, ZUN found that they were very successful – the first games he sold were Highly Responsive to Prayers and its sequel, The Story of Eastern Wonderland, at the 1997 Comiket. He brought a combined total of 80 copies, and was surprised when he was able to sell all of them. After Touhou's PC-98 era, he changed the name of his circle to "Shanghai Alice". According to ZUN, this name was chosen to fit the overall theme of the Touhou Project. "Shanghai", to him, is a multicultural city where Western and Oriental styles meet, and "Alice" evokes a feminine or gothic lolita feeling. The Japanese name, "Fantasy Ensemble" (幻樂団 Gengakudan), stems from ZUN's unsuccessful attempt to register the group as a music circle for Comiket 61 in December 2001; he decided to keep the name while applying as a game circle for Comiket 62, where he would release Embodiment of Scarlet Devil. The game received critical acclaim upon release in 2002, and the series soon developed a substantial cult following. Numerous sequels followed, several spin-offs departing from the traditional shoot 'em up format. Touhou games were sold through Comiket until 2004, when the convention Reitaisai was founded. The same year, ZUN wrote Curiosities of Lotus Asia, short stories that appeared in various magazines, which were then put together in a 2010 anthology. This was the first of several pieces of in-universe Touhou literature. Silent Sinner in Blue, the first official Touhou manga, was published in 2007. Literature continues to be produced, with the latest being the on-going Cheating Detective Satori and Lotus Eaters. In 2025, ZUN released Fossilized Wonders, the 20th game in the series.

ZUN does all the graphics, music, and programming alone for the bullet hell games, with the exceptions of the portrait art in Fairy Wars, which was done by Makoto Hirasaka. The fighting games, Immaterial and Missing Power, Scarlet Weather Rhapsody, Touhou Hisōtensoku, Hopeless Masquerade, Urban Legend in Limbo, and Antinomy of Common Flowers, were dual efforts with Twilight Frontier, in which ZUN wrote the music and story, and Twilight Frontier created the art and gameplay. ZUN develops his games with Visual Studio, Adobe Photoshop, and Cubase, according to his interview in Bohemian Archive in Japanese Red. ZUN, for the most part, had acknowledged, appreciated, and even encouraged derivative Touhou works by imposing very few restrictions on the use of his works. The major restrictions are on unauthorized commercial distribution as opposed to dōjin, and the spoiling of endings; proper attribution to Team Shanghai Alice is a requirement; creators of derivative works are asked to refrain from crowdfunding their projects. ZUN stated himself that he did not want the Touhou Project series to be officially commercialized.

In interviews, ZUN often stated his intention to re-release Embodiment of Scarlet Devil on Steam, but due to compatibility issues with later Windows releases, the game would move at abnormally high speeds and render it unplayable without fan patches; ZUN stated that he was unable to fix the issue himself, as he had lost the game's source code, making a direct port impossible. In 2017, Hidden Star in Four Seasons became the first Touhou title to be listed on a worldwide digital storefront; by the release of Fossilized Wonders, every mainline Touhou game had been added to Steam with the notable exception of Embodiment of Scarlet Devil, Perfect Cherry Blossom, and Imperishable Night. These games had ranked consistently as the top three games of the series by the annual Touhou Popularity Poll; speculation led the fan community to believe the source code had been lost for not just Embodiment, but all three missing games from the storefront.

On June 9, 2026, Touhou Koumakyou: New Classic ~ The Embodiment of Scarlet Devil, a remake of Embodiment of Scarlet Devil, was announced in the Japanese version of a Nintendo Direct. It is being developed by Shanghai Alice Reprise, a new development team helmed by ZUN and senior developers such as such as Jyunya and Unabara of Twilight Frontier, "dedicated to making Touhou Project games playable on modern platforms". The team's mission is to "make Touhou Project games playable on modern platforms", which came as a result of Embodiment of Scarlet Devil being unable to be ported to Steam due to lost source code. It will release for PC through Steam, Nintendo Switch and Switch 2, and Playstation 5 on September 9, 2026.

Embodiment of Scarlet Devil: New Classic will be translated into 11 different languages, making it the first time any mainline Touhou title has been localised outside of Japan; multiple members of the Touhou Patch Centre, previously involved in fan translation patches, were involved directly. New Classic features new enhanced visuals and redrawn sprites of the original game, a re-arranged soundtrack by ZUN, and an infinite lives mode, with an option to toggle to recreate the visuals and soundtrack of the 2002 original. Throughout the course of development, ZUN re-discovered a backup of the game's visual assets, which allowed for the inclusion of previously unseen full-body standing illustrations in the game.

Jun'ya Ōta was born in Hakuba on March 18, 1977, and described himself as a "normal countryside kid." His first exposure to video games was when he was around five years old, when he played the Game & Watch and arcade games from Hakuba ski resorts. Later, his parents bought him a Family Computer and the Disk System add-on. He picked the pseudonym ZUN due to its similarity to his given name. ZUN claimed that SonSon, Super Mario Bros. and Street Fighter II were the games that left the greatest impression on him during this period. As ZUN was born shortly after his grandfather's death and his parents spent most their time working, ZUN was mostly raised by his grandmother, who was particularly strict, and heavily regulated the time he could spend playing video games.

In 2012, ZUN married a mobile game programmer.

ZUN likes to drink beer, and has said that he drinks at least once a day. He has created his own beer (sometimes called ZUN beer), and written reviews for beers in Comptiq. His favourite brand is Kirin.