Jun Maeda

Jun Maeda is a Japanese visual novel writer and composer who co-founded Key and created stories and music for works including Kanon, AIR, and Clannad.

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Kanon: A 1999 visual novel by Key about a young man’s encounters with girls in a snowy town. Maeda wrote its scenario and composed music, helping establish Key’s sentimental storytelling.
Visual novel: An interactive fiction format that presents narrative through text, images, sound, and reader choices. This format gives Maeda’s stories room for multiple character routes and endings.
Yūto Tonokawa: A Japanese scenario writer who worked on visual novels for Key. Tonokawa shared scenario-writing responsibilities with Maeda on later Key projects.
Visual Arts: A Japanese company that produces and publishes visual novels through affiliated brands. Key was founded as a Visual Arts brand, the institutional setting for Maeda’s early work.
Clannad (anime): A television anime adaptation of Key’s visual novel Clannad, produced by Kyoto Animation. The adaptation carried Maeda’s story to a broad anime audience.
AIR: A 2000 visual novel by Key centered on a traveling puppeteer and a girl with mysterious wings. Maeda wrote the scenario and composed music for this early Key work.
Kinetic novel: A visual novel that advances as a single story without meaningful choices or branching routes. It contrasts with the branching structure used in many of Maeda’s best-known games.
Na-Ga: A Japanese illustrator and character designer associated with Key. Na-Ga’s character designs appear in several projects Maeda wrote, including Angel Beats!.
Tactics (visual novel brand): A visual novel brand where several future Key staff members worked before founding Key. Maeda worked at Tactics before moving with colleagues to establish Key.
The Day I Became a God: A 2020 original television anime written by Jun Maeda about a girl who predicts the world’s end. Its reception showed Maeda continuing to write original anime decades after Key’s formation.