Since 2020’s Demon’s Souls, Japanese video game director Hidetaka Miyazaki has shown the world a different way to think about game design. His games defy convention with punishing fights, obscure rules, and unknowable, inhospitable worlds. The “Soulslike” genre – named after Demon’s Souls and its sequel Dark Souls – is now ubiquitous, influencing multimillion-sellers from God of War and Star Wars: Jedi to Hollow Knight.
Miyazaki’s most recent success, 2022’s Elden Ring, which credited Game of Thrones author George RR Martin as a co-creator, sold over 30m copies and inspired Alex Garland to adapt it for the big screen at A24. It earned Miyazaki a spot on Time magazine’s “most influential” list, an accolade he shares with just one other game developer: Mario creator Shigeru Miyamoto. Miyazaki is now 51 and has been FromSoftware’s president since 2014, elevated from game designer to CEO after the success of the Souls series.
He has a cherubic face that could pass for 35. He rarely speaks publicly, and never on camera. When he does speak, he answers questions like one of his characters – softly, sadly, his head bowed, making eye-contact only when I am speaking.
Outside the studio where we speak is the sprawl of Tokyo’s Shinjuku, an ever-changing maze where tourists get lost and pop-up stores appear and vanish without a trace. Today, a J-pop band performs in the square as the cicadas scream from the trees. A gilded statue of Melania, one of Elden Ring’s toughest bosses, looms over this dimly lit conference room inside From’s headquarters, a bonfire checkpoint away from the chaos.
FromSoftware’s in-game universes are filled with clues – enemies, places and scraps of information from item descriptions paint a vague image of the world, and the player fills the blank space. You never fully understand these domains, although countless YouTube video game theorists have tried – as have other developers in awe of his work. Even when finishing, you are left ruminating on fun, murky elements that feel half understood.
It’s a delicious sense of intrigue.” Rather than the single-player action game that Miyazaki’s audience craves (fans are desperate for a sequel to his 2015 gothic masterpiece Bloodborne, for instance), his latest project The Duskbloods is a multiplayer Switch 2 exclusive. Eight players face off against ghoulish horrors, fighting each other to avoid being culled at the end of each round. The survivors are whittled down over three phases culminating in a final three-way battle.
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