After the release of Key's debut game Kanon (1999), video game director and Key co-founder Naoki Hisaya resigned from Key. Hisaya had led the planning of Kanon and was its main scenario writer in conjunction with fellow Key co-founder Jun Maeda. Hisaya's resignation resulted in Maeda leading the planning for Key's next work, with Maeda wanting to produce something different from not only Kanon, but also Moon (1997) and One: Kagayaku Kisetsu e (1998) that Maeda and other founding members of Key worked on previously as part of the brand Tactics under video game publisher Nexton. Maeda put pressure on himself to make something structurally different from Kanon, but he also took it upon himself following Hisaya's resignation to continue to produce "crying games" for Key's fan base. As with Kanon, Maeda wanted to write a moving story that would leave a strong impression on the player, but Air was not intentionally written to be soothing to the player despite this being a common impression by fans in October 2000. The concept for Air was one of several types of stories Maeda had wanted to write, and he chose to go with what would later become Air after careful consideration, along with taking into account the responses from people who had played Kanon. According to writer and critic Shūichirō Sarashina, a common aspect of bishōjo games at the time was to treat the individual heroine routes equally, producing a coherent narrative as a result of a sum of its parts, and he notes that Kanon also followed this pattern. Maeda focused on straying from this pattern because he wanted players to experience the entire story as a whole, but he still wanted its content to be enjoyable as a bishōjo game so that as many people as possible would be satisfied by it. In doing so, Maeda kept the basic structure of having multiple heroine routes, but he realized that he could not give each character the same level of focus. When developing the plot, the basic structure of having multiple points of view and an overarching storyline had already been solidified, which according to Maeda was not something he was aware of having been done in visual novels at the time. Fellow scenario writer Yūichi Suzumoto was apprehensive about this structure when he first heard about the plot from Maeda, but Air executive producer and Visual Arts president Takahiro