They had a gun and could find health-rejuvenating objects to actually give them a fighting chance. Suddenly, the player wasn’t just scrambling to get away. So he made some big changes - namely, “the concept of surviving.” He didn’t just want the player to run away from the danger he wanted them to have the means to defeat the danger. He worked on a few more Disney-licensed properties, “Goof Troop” and “Aladdin,” before the development head at the time, Tokuro Fujiwara, came to him with what would eventually become “Resident Evil.” In the beginning, it was meant to be purely a horror game, based on the system used by Fujiwara’s horror title “Sweet Home.”īut there was some hesitance on Mikami’s part, as he was worried the game wouldn’t sell in its current form. With no one to quit to, he moved onto the next project, “Who Framed Roger Rabbit,” also for the Gameboy. He intended to quit after the project was done, but his boss beat him to it. “It was hell,” he recalls, having to work until 5 a.m. His first project, he remembers, was a competitive quiz game for Nintendo’s Gameboy. And so it’d be fun to work with a crazy person who sits at the top.”
“It was a crazy venture that he was going for. “I thought the chairman was crazy,” he laughs. Mikami says it was “a crazy big dream” at the time, as the only gaming company that was listed in the first level of the Japanese stock exchange was Nintendo.
There, he found out Capcom’s chairman, Kenzo Tsujimoto, wanted to make a public stock offering for the company. After that, his friend brought him a flyer for a party at Capcom, which was hiring, so he attended. He was rejected, however, and tried to get interviews for finance jobs, which also didn’t work out. What he did know was that he wanted a job where he could create something, so he applied to steel manufacturer Nippon Steel, which was moving into the bio industry at the time. It wasn’t until he was 22 that he had enough money to get the Famicom, Nintendo’s home console.īut when it came to starting his career, gaming wasn’t necessarily his focus. But eventually, he conceded, and started to go more and more often, taking to fighting games at the time. Around the age of 20, his friends started dragging him to arcades - reluctantly, at first. Long before the days of Capcom and “Resident Evil,” Mikami’s first experience with games, he remembers, was playing “Space Invaders” in a café for ¥100 per game. “You want more detail than that, though, right?” “I started because I really liked games,” Mikami says. Below, Mikami talks about his start, the beginning of the survival horror genre, why he left Capcom and started Tango, what he wants to do in the future and why he might not be done directing just yet.
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