In an interview with Famitsu (translated by 1UP), Resident Evil creator Shinji Mikami explained how he joined the gaming industry fresh out of college. The most surprising thing about this tale is where Mikami almost ended up instead of Capcom.
"A friend of mine had found a flyer advertising some kind of job fair-slash-buffet party Capcom was holding at the Hilton and he gave it to me because he knew I liked games,” said Mikami. “I went mainly because I wanted to eat at the Hilton for free, but once I started talking to Capcom people, really getting in depth about the work they do, I thought it sounded pretty neat.”
“So I applied to both Capcom and Nintendo, and it turned out the second round of interviews for both companies were held on the same day, and I chose Capcom. It's likely for the better because I probably never had a chance with Nintendo -- it took a company like Capcom to pick me up."
Unfortunately, Mikami sees Resident Evil’s success as the point where everything went wrong for him at Capcom.
"After RE1 was done, they made me into a producer and I had to step away from the front lines of development," he explained. "There was a time when I wanted to leave Capcom because of that -- I joined Capcom in order to create things, and I thought that going away from that would be counterproductive. It was hard, not being directly involved with the development process."
Mikami is no longer with Capcom, having left for Clover Studio in 2004, and Platnium Games in 2007. He currently heads up ZeniMax’ Tango Gameworks studio, hiring creative people and preparing to unleash a new AAA title on the unsuspecting masses.
1 Comments
November 12, 2010
Capcom has lost a lot of great talent of late, between Mikami, Inafune, the Clover staff... their quality has always been pretty high but I wonder how much longer that will last if this continues and they keep outsourcing projects.