,” helping to launch what would become a billion-dollar franchise across gaming and film.
Long before the days of Capcom and “Resident Evil,” Mikami’s first experience with games, he remembers, was playing “Space Invaders” in a café for ¥100 per game. Around the age of 20, his friends started dragging him to arcades — reluctantly, at first. But eventually, he conceded, and started to go more and more often, taking to fighting games at the time. It wasn’t until he was 22 that he had enough money to get the Famicom, Nintendo’s home console.
Mikami got the job, and got to work. His first project, he remembers, was a competitive quiz game for Nintendo’s Gameboy. “It was hell,” he recalls, having to work until 5 a.m. every day for three months. He intended to quit after the project was done, but his boss beat him to it. With no one to quitHe worked on a few more Disney-licensed properties, “Goof Troop” and “Aladdin,” before the development head at the time, Tokuro Fujiwara, came to him with what would eventually become “Resident Evil.
And push forward it did, coming out originally for the PlayStation on March 22, 1996. Mikami estimated that it would move 500,000 copies and then “probably stop selling.” That estimate would prove to be incredibly modest: over its lifespan, the original “Resident Evil” has sold more than 5 million copies. Capcom had a new blockbuster IP, and work on a sequel quickly ramped up.
Mikami also remembers being “very grateful” to the execs at Capcom who allowed them to start from scratch, resulting in a very different game than they had originally embarked on. Mikami would continue to work on the series, producing “Resident Evil 3: Nemesis” with director Kazuhiro Aoyama, before stepping back into the director’s chair for “Resident Evil 4.”“Resident Evil 4” marked a major departure for the series, veering away from horror and more toward action.
Ahead of “Resident Evil 4’s” release, Mikami signed an exclusive deal with Nintendo. It was a decision, he explains, that was born out of concern for the gaming industry. Sony had PlayStation, but there was a belief that if its gaming endeavors didn’t work out, “they might just go back to what they’re good at and what they’re known for.” He had the same concern with Microsoft and its Xbox.
Ultimately, “Resident Evil 4” was ported onto several other consoles, and Mikami stayed with Capcom . Now, Mikami has something of a sense of humor about the ordeal, and can even acknowledge that “going multi-platform probably was the right thing to do, business-wise.” “Resident Evil 4,” after all, did end up selling 10 million copies across its lifespan.
Wanting to be more hands-on with games again, he moved to PlatinumGames in 2007, along with his fellow Clover Studio alums Atsushi Inaba and Kamiya, and directed third-person shooter “Vanquish” there. “The execs obviously were not happy with the concept and it didn’t get released,” he adds. “But we did make the game to the end.”