Shinji Mikami | Code Like It's 198x

The man who gave the world Resident Evil does not, by his own account, enjoy being frightened. When his boss at Capcom, Tokuro Fujiwara, handed him a horror game to direct in 1993, Wireframe reported, Shinji Mikami was unenthusiastic: he had no experience of horror and “didn’t even like being scared by entertainment products”. He made it anyway. Resident Evil was his debut as a director, its team was mostly new to Capcom, and a consultant’s report recommended cancelling it. It sold millions, and Capcom’s marketing phrase for it, “survival horror”, became the name of a genre. Nine years later he took the series apart and rebuilt it as Resident Evil 4, a game that Edge credited with “inspiring a new generation of action titles”.

Fast facts

Born: 1965, in Yamaguchi prefecture, Japan.
Capcom (1990–2006): planner on Disney games for the Super Nintendo; director of Resident Evil (1996), the GameCube Resident Evil (2002), P.N.03 (2003) and Resident Evil 4 (2005); producer of Resident Evil 2 (1998) and Dino Crisis (1999); director of God Hand (2006) at Clover Studio.
Platinum Games (2007–2010): a founding member; director of Vanquish (2010).
Tango Gameworks (2010–2023): founder; director of The Evil Within (2014).
Since 2023: his own company, KAMUY.

From quiz games to Disney

Mikami was born in Yamaguchi prefecture, dreamed of being a Formula One driver, and studied at Doshisha University, where, Wireframe noted, his subject was “the study of merchandise”. He did not start playing video games seriously until he was 20. Capcom hired him about halfway through 1990, a week or two after telling him he was not getting a job there. His first game, made in three months, was a Game Boy quiz, Capcom Quiz: Hatena? no Daibouken, in which Capcom characters such as Firebrand and Dr Wily try to stop the player answering correctly.

Disney licences followed. Mikami worked on Who Framed Roger Rabbit for the Game Boy, and on the Super Nintendo he was the lead designer of Goof Troop and a planner on Capcom’s Aladdin (both 1993). Retro Gamer found that Goof Troop “borrows heavily from A Link To The Past, but that only assures its quality”.

Resident Evil

In 1993 Mikami was asked to head a horror project built on the system of Sweet Home, Fujiwara’s Famicom game of 1989. “Biohazard’s starting point came when my boss at the time — Fujiwara-san — told me to make a horror title using the game system of Sweet Home,” he told Retro Gamer. He started planning in January 1994, dropped his first idea of a game full of ghosts, and settled on zombies after remembering Dawn of the Dead. For the first six months, he said, “I was the ‘team’”; by the end more than 50 people were working on it.

He placed the fixed cameras to hide the enemy. “Even if you knew before looking round a corner that a zombie was going to be there, we set up blind spots so that players wouldn’t be able to see the zombies [immediately] and that in turn produced an uneasy feeling that caused players to feel afraid,” he said. “I remember thinking if the enemies were only scary because of the possibility of ‘game over’, it wouldn’t be sufficient for me to reach my goal with Biohazard.”

The pressure was real. “I knew that if Biohazard wasn’t a big success there was a danger that Capcom would face bankruptcy,” Mikami told Retro Gamer, and when it was finished he “seemed to be the only one who was completely burnt out”. He still dislikes the Western title, which Capcom’s American office chose without him: it is, he said, “stupid”. The full story of the game, from the Saturn version to the “Jill sandwich”, is in the Resident Evil entry.

Producer and general manager

Success moved Mikami out of the director’s chair. On Resident Evil 2 (1998) he was producer and Hideki Kamiya directed for the first time; Mikami, Retro Gamer wrote, “simply oversaw Kamiya’s work and made changes wherever necessary”. By the summer of 1999 Edge counted four million Resident Evil games sold and described Mikami as “instrumental in restructuring Capcom from its 2D beat ’em up past”. He was producing Dino Crisis, a survival horror game with dinosaurs in real-time 3D rooms, and Resident Evil 3 Nemesis, and overseeing Code: Veronica for the Dreamcast. “People call me on my mobile phone when they need me. That’s why I’ve lost so much weight,” he joked. Edge and the Official U.S. PlayStation Magazine credited him as producer of Dino Crisis; later profiles, including Wireframe’s, list it among the games he directed. Wireframe puts its sales at 2.4 million.

He explained the difference between the two series to the Official U.S. PlayStation Magazine: in Dino Crisis “you are constantly chased by huge, agile, overwhelmingly powerful creatures. It’s a panicking horror. In Resident Evil, you guard yourself against slow-crawling zombies.”

Devil May Cry (2001) began, the Australian magazine PlayStation 2 reported, as Mikami’s attempt to reinvent Resident Evil for the PlayStation 2, and grew into something else. Kamiya directed it, with Mikami, in the words of New Zealand’s Official PlayStation Magazine, “at the helm”. Looking back in 2010, Edge summed up this side of his career as “producer on countless titles from Steel Battalion to Viewtiful Joe”.

The GameCube and Resident Evil 4

In 2001 Mikami took the series to Nintendo. Edge reported Shigeru Miyamoto appearing in person “to endorse Shinji Mikami’s decision to port Biohazard to GameCube”, and Mikami directed a near-complete remake of the first game for it in 2002. His studio, Production Studio 4, also promised Nintendo five GameCube games, later called the Capcom Five: P.N.03, which Mikami directed, Viewtiful Joe, Killer7, Resident Evil 4 and Dead Phoenix, which was cancelled. Edge called Mikami “widely seen to be the catalyst” for the deal. He was sure of it. “Resident Evil 4 will definitely release only on GameCube,” he said in 2002. “If it [comes to another console], I will cut my head off.” When Capcom announced a PlayStation 2 version at the end of 2004, Electronic Gaming Monthly quoted him and added: “Time to sharpen the axe.”

Resident Evil 4 took years to find. Capcom’s producer Hiroyuki Kobayashi told Edge that the finished game was “actually the fourth version”, and Mikami was asked to return as its director. He moved the camera over Leon Kennedy’s shoulder and set the game in a European village, and, Kobayashi said, it was “Mikami’s idea!” that the villagers should speak Spanish, so that Leon and the player would face “a language they could not understand”. Edge found that it “unmistakably feels like a Mikami game - aggressive” and, looking back in 2012, called it “Mikami’s bold reinvention of the series”, which “swept away inertia, reinvigorating the survival horror genre while inspiring a new generation of action titles”. The control scheme it kept from the older games is explained in tank controls.

Clover and Platinum

In 2004 the producer Atsushi Inaba set up Clover Studio inside Capcom. Asked by Edge what roles Kamiya and Mikami would take there, he said they were “simply” directors. Mikami’s game there was God Hand (2006), a beat ’em up that, Edge thought, “looks for the ridiculous in the action genre and embraces it”, and that although Mikami had not “gone soft”, “he’s certainly lightened up a little”. Capcom dissolved Clover in October 2006. A year later Inaba, Kamiya and Mikami’s holding company, Seeds, merged with another to form Platinum Games.

At Platinum Mikami directed Vanquish (2010), a fast third-person shooter in which an armoured soldier boosts across the battlefield against an army made entirely of robots. At its launch in Tokyo he mocked a US website for its review of God Hand and told the audience that “this is not P.N.03”. Edge interviewed him again that year about Shadows of the Damned, which he made with Goichi Suda’s Grasshopper Manufacture and which came out in 2011. Suda, he said, had the last word; Mikami was “in charge of the game’s balance, systems and mechanics”. Working on it while finishing Vanquish and founding a studio of his own “was hell on Earth! You have no idea.”

Tango Gameworks

Mikami left Platinum after Vanquish to set up his own studio, Tango Gameworks. “Mr Mikami always wanted to be his own man, and his own developer,” Platinum’s chief executive told Edge. Tango became part of ZeniMax, the owner of Bethesda, as its only studio in Japan, and its first game was The Evil Within (2014), which Mikami directed: his return to the genre his first game had named. “Not much has changed when it comes to instilling terror in the player,” he told Edge in 2013. “But people have got used to the tropes of horror and they know what’s coming next, so in that sense it is harder to make them afraid.” His answer was enemies that bullets could not stop: “Even if you shoot them they won’t die, so you’ll have to run or use a trap to beat them. That should be fun — and also scary.”

Tango, he said, was also a school. He named three staff he hoped would become directors and said it might take five to ten years to build a really strong team. After The Evil Within he produced rather than directed: Tango’s later games were The Evil Within 2 (2017), Ghostwire: Tokyo (2022) and the rhythm-action game Hi-Fi Rush (2023). In February 2023 Bethesda announced that Mikami would leave Tango “in the coming months”, thanking him as “a creative leader and supportive mentor to young developers”. A year later Microsoft, which had bought ZeniMax, closed the studio, and in August 2024 the Korean publisher Krafton bought it and the Hi-Fi Rush series.

By then Mikami had a new company. In March 2024 Gematsu reported that he had set up KAMUY, registered in Tokyo in October 2023.

Sources

Wireframe issue 20, August 2019, pp. 50–53, developer profile of Shinji Mikami: birth in Yamaguchi prefecture in 1965; Formula One; Doshisha University; joining Capcom in mid-1990; the Game Boy quiz game; Roger Rabbit, Goof Troop and Aladdin; the 1993 horror project and his reluctance; Dino Crisis sales; the GameCube remake; the Capcom Five; God Hand as Clover’s last release; Vanquish; Tango and The Evil Within.
Jonti Davies, “The Making of Resident Evil”, Retro Gamer, reprinted in Retro Gamer Collection volume 4, 2010, pp. 118–123: interview with Shinji Mikami (Fujiwara and Sweet Home, January 1994, the team, blind spots, fear, bankruptcy and burn-out, the Western title); sidebars on Aladdin, Goof Troop and Resident Evil 2.
Edge issue 71, May 1999: Dino Crisis preview (“Shinji Mikami, producer”). Edge issue 74, August 1999, pp. 34–39: Resident Evil 3 Nemesis feature (four million sold, restructuring Capcom, producer of Dino Crisis and Nemesis, Code: Veronica, the mobile phone).
Official U.S. PlayStation Magazine vol. 2 issue 9, June 1999: Dino Crisis preview and interview with Mikami (producer; “a panicking horror”).
Official PlayStation Magazine (New Zealand) issue 41, January 2001: Devil May Cry news (Mikami “at the helm”, Kamiya directing). PlayStation 2 (Australia) issue 5, August 2002: Devil May Cry 2 feature (the first game’s origin as Resident Evil 4).
Edge issue 103, November 2001: Miyamoto and the move of Biohazard to GameCube.
Edge issue 135, April 2004: Resident Evil 4 preview (the Capcom Five, Mikami as director).
Edge issue 138, July 2004: interview with Atsushi Inaba on Clover Studio.
Electronic Gaming Monthly issue 187, January 2005: Resident Evil 4 for the PlayStation 2 and Mikami’s 2002 promise.
Edge issue 146, February 2005: interview with Hiroyuki Kobayashi (“the fourth version”, the Spanish-speaking villagers).
Edge issue 165, August 2006: God Hand preview.
Edge issue 169, December 2006: the closure of Clover Studio.
Edge issue 213, April 2010, p. 50: Vanquish launch.
Edge issue 219, October 2010: Platinum Games and Vanquish; Mikami’s new studio, Tango.
Edge issue 221, December 2010: interview with Shinji Mikami on Shadows of the Damned.
Edge issue 241, June 2012: Resident Evil 6 preview (Resident Evil 4’s influence).
Edge issue 246, November 2012: studio profile of Platinum Games (Seeds, October 2007, Vanquish, Mikami leaving to found Tango).
Edge issue 261, Christmas 2013, p. 108: interview with Shinji Mikami (Tango, ZeniMax, The Evil Within, future directors).
Game Informer, “Shinji Mikami Is Leaving Tango Gameworks”, 23 February 2023 (web, secondary): Bethesda’s statement; Tango’s games. https://gameinformer.com/2023/02/23/shinji-mikami-is-leaving-tango-gameworks
Game Developer, “Krafton acquires Tango Gameworks and Hi-Fi Rush franchise from Microsoft”, 12 August 2024 (web, secondary): the May 2024 closure and the acquisition. https://www.gamedeveloper.com/business/krafton-acquires-tango-gameworks-and-hi-fi-rush-franchise-from-microsoft
Gematsu, “Shinji Mikami establishes new studio KAMUY”, 21 March 2024 (web, secondary). https://www.gematsu.com/2024/03/shinji-mikami-establishes-new-studio-kamuy
Wikipedia, “Shinji Mikami” (web, secondary): his years at Capcom (1990–2006); his roles on Dino Crisis, The Evil Within 2, Ghostwire: Tokyo and Hi-Fi Rush. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shinji_Mikami