Shinji Mikami explains why he founded a new studio and comments on his departure from Tango Gameworks

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In March of this year, it was revealed that Shinji Mikami founded a new studio called KAMUY. He had left Tango Gameworks in 2023.

Mikami appeared on the Japanese YouTube channel ‘Byking’ to discuss his career and what he wants to do in the future. According to the Automaton website (via VGC and https://twitter.com/Genki_JPN/status/1783833176944849328), Mikami said he had been planning to leave Tango for eight years before doing so, but felt a responsibility to continue working on the studio’s games.

Asked why he wanted to leave, he cited his desire to create an environment designed to give young creators a more regular experience by creating games with shorter development cycles, and said he thinks there is an audience for more unique, small-scale titles. scale.

“I was CEO for only 6 months,” he said. “I think a lot of people had the impression that I was the representative, but I was closer to an ordinary employee. I had a producer associated with my name, but I wasn’t an executive or anything like that,” he clarifies.

With the new studio KAMUY, Mikami wants to make games that are not “survival horror”, like The Evil Within.

Interestingly, Mikami also reveals that the name of the company he worked for is not Tango Gameworks, but “ZeniMax Asia KK”. Tango Gameworks is just the name of the department and through negotiations it kept the name and was allowed to preserve it in the form of a trademark.