Hidetaka Miyazaki
Hidetaka Miyazaki is a Japanese video game director, designer, writer, and company president of FromSoftware. He originally joined them in 2004 as a game designer for the Armored Core series, later becoming known for creating the Souls series, starting with Demon's Souls in 2009. Other games he has worked on include Bloodborne and .
Miyazaki's influences range from the works of various novelists, mangakas, and other game designers such as Fumito Ueda and Yuji Horii, as well as Asian and European architecture. Miyazaki's games, particularly the Souls series, often invoke the use of high difficulty, strong visual and environmental storytelling, and a large amount of setting and character background information provided through mostly vague flavor text and fluff. His work in the Souls series has been seen as influential, with him winning awards and being cited as an auteur of the video game medium.
Early life
Miyazaki grew up "tremendously poor" while living in the city of Shizuoka, Japan, stating that he had no life ambitions as a child. Despite that, he was a heavy reader, but as his parents could not afford to buy him books or manga, he had to borrow from his local library. The books he read at the time, many in English, were sometimes beyond his reading capabilities, with parts he could not fully understand. Using his imagination to fill in the blanks by using the accompanying illustrations, Miyazaki used this as inspiration for some of his later ideas on video game design. Alongside this, he was restricted from playing video games by his parents until he was old enough to attend university, so he instead played gamebooks and tabletop games such as Steve Jackson's Sorcery! and Dungeons & Dragons.Career
After graduating from Keio University with a degree in social science, Miyazaki went to work doing account managing for the US based Oracle Corporation. Upon a friend's recommendation, Miyazaki began playing the 2001 video game Ico, causing him to consider a career change to a game designer. At age 29 however, Miyazaki found that few game companies would employ him, with one of the few being FromSoftware, where Miyazaki began working as a game planner on ' in 2004, joining the game's development halfway through. Miyazaki later directed Armored Core 4 and its direct sequel, '.Upon learning about what later became Demon's Souls, Miyazaki became excited at the prospect of a fantasy action role-playing game and offered to help. The project, up until Miyazaki was assigned to it, was considered a failure by the company, with Miyazaki stating "I figured if I could find a way to take control of the game, I could turn it into anything I wanted. Best of all, if my ideas failed, nobody would care – it was already a failure." Although the game was received negatively at the 2009 Tokyo Game Show and sold far under expectations upon release, it began to pick up after a few months and soon found publishers willing to release the title outside of Japan. After the release and success of the game's spiritual successor Dark Souls in 2011, Miyazaki was promoted to the position of company president in May 2014.
After the release of the Prepare to Die edition of Dark Souls in August 2012, Sony Computer Entertainment approached FromSoftware concerning cooperative development on a new title. Miyazaki asked about the possibility of developing a game for eighth-generation consoles, and the concept of Bloodborne developed from there. There were no story or setting connections to FromSoftware's previous games, even though Miyazaki conceded that it carried the "DNA" of Demon's Souls and its specific level design. Development ran parallel to that of Dark Souls II, which Miyazaki supervised only as he was unable to direct both games simultaneously.
After the release of Bloodborne in March 2015, Miyazaki returned to the Souls series as the director on Dark Souls III, with assistance from ' and Dark Souls II directors Isamu Okano and Yui Tanimura, respectively. After its release, Miyazaki stated his intentions to personally stop development on the Souls series. His next two projects were the 2018 virtual reality game Déraciné and the 2019 action-adventure game '. At the 2018 Golden Joystick Awards ceremony, he was awarded the show's Lifetime Achievement Award for his contributions to the video game industry. The award was presented to him by Ian Livingstone and Steve Jackson, two of his design influences. Miyazaki is also set to direct the action role-playing game Elden Ring, written in collaboration with A Song of Ice and Fire series author George R. R. Martin.
Influences and design philosophy
Miyazaki's influences include video games such as Ico, the early Dragon Quest games, and The Legend of Zelda and King's Field video game series, manga series such as Berserk, Saint Seiya, JoJo's Bizarre Adventure, and Devilman, the literary works of H. P. Lovecraft, Bram Stoker, and George R. R. Martin, and gamebooks such as Steve Jackson's Sorcery! and RuneQuest. Miyazaki is also inspired by architecture, especially of Europe, and often uses it as a way of environmental storytelling. Psychology, sociology, and the history of humanity have also influenced his design philosophy.The multiplayer mechanics of the Souls series were inspired by his own personal experience of driving up on a snowy road as cars ahead began slipping back and were pushed up hill by other people in the area. As Miyazaki was unable to give his appreciation to them before leaving the area, he wondered whether the last person in the line had made it to their destination, thinking that he would probably never meet them again. This gave birth to the series' interconnected multiplayer systems, with it attempting to emulate that same sense of silent cooperation in the face of adversity.
Miyazaki stated that the notable difficulty of the Souls series had no intention of being more difficult than other games. Rather, the difficulty was a part of the process that gives players a sense of accomplishment by "overcoming tremendous odds", while also having a certain level of difficulty incentivizing players to experiment more with character builds and weapons. He stated that death in his games are meant to be used as a trial and error learning tool, adding that the idea was only accepted by players following the success of Demon's Souls.
When asked about his style of storytelling, Miyazaki stated that despite what others may believe, he does not dislike direct storytelling, but instead prefers players to interpret the world for themselves; stating that the player gets more value from it when "they themselves find out hints of plot from items or side-characters they encounter in the world". Many gaming journalists and critics have called him an "auteur" of video games, noting his influential work in the Souls series that has gone on to influence other game designers.