The announcement is therefore not yet public at the time of this writing, but Bethesda employees have just learned from their vice president, Todd Vaughn, that the famous director of Resident Evil, Dino Crisis, Resident Evil 4 , God Hand, Vanquish and The Evil Within will leave in a few months the studio he founded independently in 2010 before being bought after a few months by Bethesda. Under the wing of the American publisher, the Japanese studio first launched a new survival horror license with The Evil Within (2014) then The Evil Within 2 (2017), before taking a detour through action in open world with Ghostwire: Tokyo. In a very different register, Tango Gameworks created the pleasant surprise of this beginning of the year with the rhythm action game Hi-Fi Rush. A game made not by Shinji Mikami but John Johanas, previously responsible for The Evil Within 2 and which Todd Vaughn describes as “one of the most successful launches in recent years for Bethesda and Xbox.“
—Bethesda (@bethesda) February 23, 2023
“We haven’t really made the game I want yet.”
Credited as executive producer since The Evil Within 2, Shinji Mikami, 57, recently expressed the wish to make one more game before retiring, stressing that he has not yet been able to make his ideal game. His departure from Tango Gameworks, however, sheds some light on the future of the veteran, whose career began in 1990 at Capcom before taking off in 1996 with the release of Resident Evil, a franchise that has since sold 135 million. of games in the world. His trajectory, often linked to that of personalities like Atsushi Inaba and Hideki Kamiya, could have led him to register for the long term at PlatinumGames, but Mikami preferred to leave the studio after the release of Vanquish to reconnect with horror on The Evil Within, not without having taken under his wing the young artist Ikumi Nakamura, still unknown at the time.
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