Shinji Mikami, creator of Resident Evil, speaks up about his departure from Tango Gameworks

One of the most important individuals in the video game industry is Shinji Mikami, creator of Resident Evil, and founder of Tango Gameworks. His departure from the studio caught many by surprise, but now he has spoken about it on Byking, a Japanese YouTube channel in which he was asked about his departure (via Automaton).

Mikami spoke about the financial difficulties that Tango Gameworks had in the year it was founded, being acquired by ZeniMax Media: “Tango Gameworks is not the name of a company, it’s the name of a department. The name of the company is ZeniMax Asia K.K.” Mikami negotiated to retain the Tango Gameworks name and received permission to do so.

He also spoke and clarified about the role he had at Tango Gameworks before his departure: “I had only been CEO for 6 months. I think a lot of people were under the impression that I was the representative, but I was very close to a rank-and-file employee. I had “___ producer” attached to my name, but I wasn’t an executive or anything of the sort.”

Shinji Mikami, a legend of the video game industry

Mikami revealed during the talk that he planned to leave Tango Gameworks for eight years until he finally did. The responsibility he felt around ongoing projects prolonged his stay at the company. In addition, he noted his personal desire to break free from the survival horror genre, with his new company, Kamuy, seeking to focus on allowing young creators to have more opportunities to gain experience with shorter cycles in the development of new projects.

Shinji Mikami is one of the most relevant figures in the history of the video game industry. A career in which he is especially recognized for being the genius behind Resident Evil, laying the foundations of an entire genre such as survival horror and along with its best-known saga, directing others such as Dino Crisis and being executive producer of others as well-known as Devil May Cry and Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney among many others. His history with Capcom is enormous, and from there Clover Studio would also be born, which brought a work as interesting as God Hand; After that, PlatinumGames and a game as frenetic and fun as Vanquish and, finally, Tango Gameworks, a studio founded by Mikami himself and which has created games such as The Evil Within saga, Ghostwire: Tokyo and Hi-Fi Rush.