Rob Jinnai

<forumuser name="Rob Jinnai" /> Rob Jinnai is a Pittsburgh, PA native generally known for either the Sonic SatAM fangame Sonic Epoch or the El-Hazard anime website "El-Hazard Online." Somewhere around 1999, Sonic Epoch led Rob to his first entrance onto the Internet forum at SFGHQ, first as Jomo25 (a temporary I-got-nothin'-better name, based on "Jomo" used from childhood games and "25" from AOL's forced appending of user names with numbers) and then formalized as "The Epoch Man."

Looking for something else to obsess over, Rob became "Rob Jinnai", from the (arguably) most popular/awesome villain character Jinnai from the anime El-Hazard. Over the next few years, Rob quickly constructed an El-Hazard website that essentially rose above all others (at least in US-based sites) and is still considered as such today, even though updates have ceased and its meager community has all but dried up. This site also brought a crude reconstruction of the El-Hazard Sega Saturn picture-RPG game created by Rob and his younger brother Tim for the PC and GBA platforms. (The former was generally ignored, the latter proved popular with GBA homebrew sites for its technical feat, but not so much for the content.)

Trivia

• Now known elsewhere as RobS or Southbird, the former being a merging of first name and last initial, the latter being a reference to a One Piece fictional animal that always faces southward
• The only game project he has ever fully completed would be the El-Hazard Sega Saturn port
• Sonic Epoch was later completed as a quick/lame job for the GBA, but, while Rob attributes this to finding websites of pure hatred dedicated to the title, he occasionally swears he'll do it "right" ... "someday, maybe", and at that time being sure to ignore judgment of lamers
• There is a flash cartoon series by the name of "Sonic Epoch", whose pilot episode is in fact a blatant poke at the entire plot of Sonic Epoch GBA with excessive Tails cursing, Dr. Robotnik mentioning returning "from space", and other things. However, later episodes deviated into their own material, though continued to use the name. Rob has chosen to laugh at it, figuring it's payback for screwing up what could have been a much better production. Again, "someday, maybe" he'll do it right.