Resident Evil Director Shinji Mikami's New Studio Is Working on Original AAA IP
Unbound's first game will be released on PC and consoles.
Capcom
Shinji Mikami, the founder of Tango Gameworks and Resident Evil director, left his studio in 2023 and established a new one, called Unbound. Until recently, its website was quiet, but its job listings spilled some light on what Unbound is working on.
Mikami's "fully independent company" is developing "a wide range of games, from original high-end consumer games to large-scale AAA titles and challenging smaller titles," and specifically, an "original IP project" at the moment.
There is not much information about this mysterious game, but the studio wants to release it on PS5, Xbox, and PC.
Unbound
"Our company was founded to develop games that are truly user-oriented and fun. We
are committed to developing games that users can truly enjoy. We passionately create games that will amaze the world in an office where someone is always discussing ideas. Our slogan is 'Turn intuition into ideas.' We at Unbound are the ones who give shape to these ideas every day."
Unbound
Unbound has 53 employees, who contributed to Ghostwire: Tokyo, Shadow of the Colossus, Silent Hill, Resident Evil, Devil May Cry, Sonic the Hedgehog, New Light Myth: Mirror Mirror, Hi-Fi RUSH, Ōkami, killer7, Custom Robo: Battle Revolution, The Demon and the Lost Kingdom, PsychoBreak, Viewtiful Joe, Dead Rising, Dino Crisis, Lost Planet, Onimusha, and El Shaddai: Ascension of the Metatron.
One of them is Masato Kimura, Ghostwire: Tokyo and Hi-Fi Rush producer, who said that the company's first game will be "a AAA title for high-end consumers."
"However, to be honest, it would be difficult to do the same kind of work in Japan as overseas AAA titles, which require hundreds of billions of yen and hundreds of people working for five to seven years to create," he said (via VGC). "So, we’re aiming for AAA quality and AA content, which is why we’re creating a title that offers a rich gaming experience and allows you to be completely immersed in its world."
Unbound
He added that "creating something new requires repeated trial and error, implementation and modification, tinkering, and sometimes even deletion," and while the studio is "trying this and that, things don’t always go as planned, and the content changes constantly."
"To put it in a positive way, it’s a lively production style, a flexible development style. The programmers we work with have to be willing to put up with that all the way through, so we want people who enjoy that way of creating to join us."
We are looking forward to what Mikami's new team will cook and if it will be as similar to RE as Toshihiro Nagoshi's Gang of Dragon is to his previous franchise, Like a Dragon. A report of his studio losing NetEase's funding has just appeared, and I hope Unbound won't know such a fate.
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