Yoko Taro (横尾 太郎, Yokoo Tarō, born June 6, 1970) is a Japanese video game director and scenario writer. Starting his career at the now-defunct game company Cavia, his best-known work was on the action role-playing video game series Drakengard, and its spin-offs, Nier and Nier: Automata. Yoko was born in Nagoya, Aichi, and studied at the Kobe Design University in the 1990s. While he did not initially intend to pursue a career in video games, after working at Namco and Sony, he joined Cavia and became the director and scenario writer for the first Drakengard game. He has since worked extensively on every game in the series (except Drakengard 2), and on mobile titles, after becoming a freelancer after Cavia's absorption into AQ Interactive.