Hideki Kamiya has had the sort of career a lot of game designers can only dream of. Nearly all of his work -- Resident Evil 2, Devil May Cry, Viewtiful Joe, Okami -- has received critical praise, and he gets the freedom to create nearly whatever he wants to in a business where actual creative freedom is a limited resource. Who's he got to thank for it? According to a Famitsu interview published over the past three weeks in Japan, it mainly comes down to Shinji Mikami -- his boss both at Capcom and his current outfit, Platinum games.
"I think Mikami is the person I've been influenced by the most," Kamiya told Famitsu. "I've gone from Capcom's Production Studio 4 to Clover and now Platinum Games, but the thing that's linked all of that together is 'PS4-ism.' The people here think in PS4 terms, so anyone that joins the company adopts those habits as well."
This PS4-ism apparently saved Kamiya from doom in the Resident Evil 2 project, which was at one point completely scrapped and rebuilt from the ground up -- the abandoned RE2 is now known as "Resident Evil 1.5" among series fans. "I screwed up once with RE2," Kamiya admitted. "It was my first director project, and I really messed things up on it. That was my first real taste of 'PS4-ism' the way that Mikami saw it. If you fail, then you fail for a reason -- I was making too many compromises in my own mind; my directorial skill wasn't there. If you con yourself into making too many compromises, then that's going to affect the quality of the game and screw up the whole thing in the end. The experience gave me a chance to reconsider what I was doing with my career; I guess it was the first time I recognized the value of working under Mikami after all that time."
Read more here:
Platinum Games' Kamiya Reflects on Bayonetta, Okami
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