Shinji Mikami
Mikami built survival horror and then broke it himself, which is the rarest career shape in games. He joined Capcom in 1990 and directed the first Resident Evil in 1996, a game whose constraints did the design work: fixed camera angles you cannot see around, controls deliberately stiff enough to make a corridor frightening, an inventory small enough that every bullet is a decision. Dino Crisis followed in 1999 on the same principles, with dinosaurs instead of zombies.
Then he did it twice more, in opposite directions. The 2002 remake is the purest version of the original idea, the one that treats a mansion as a machine for generating dread. Resident Evil 4 threw the whole apparatus out: camera over the shoulder, enemies that swarm and use tools, a pace that never lets you settle. A decade of third-person action games borrowed from it, which is a strange fate for a horror sequel. His last Capcom project, God Hand in 2006, is the joke version of all of this, a beat 'em up that reads now like a deliberate refusal to make anything prestigious.
After Capcom he kept starting over. He founded PlatinumGames in 2006 and directed Vanquish in 2010, a shooter about a man on rocket-powered knees, then left the studio the same year it shipped. He founded Tango Gameworks, returned to horror with The Evil Within in 2014, produced and executive-produced widely, set up another company called Unbound in 2022, and left Tango in 2023. He is not a man who stays.
Movies (2)
TV (1)
Games (4)
Where to start with Shinji Mikami
Go straight to Resident Evil 4 and do not let anyone talk you into chronology first. It is the most playable thing he made, it is the game the rest of the industry copied, and its opening village sequence is one of the great teaching passages in the medium: it explains its entire grammar without a single tutorial box.
Then go backwards to Resident Evil (2002), which pulls the other way, slow and airless and built on the fear of walking into a room you have already cleared. Play it on a decent screen with the lights off. Resident Evil 2 (1998) shows the formula at its most confident and generous, two campaigns in one city, and his name sits on it as producer.
Beyond horror, Devil May Cry 3: Dante's Awakening is the studio culture he came out of at its most gleefully excessive, and Why Horror? is the documentary if you want him talking rather than designing, which he rarely does at length.