Shinji Mikami

Japan · Born 1965 · Capcom · Game Director, Producer

He joined Capcom after a friend spotted a job-fair flyer, made his name on a Disney platformer, and then directed Resident Evil — the game that gave survival horror its name and its rules.

Shinji Mikami was born on 11 August 1965 in Iwakuni, Yamaguchi, and studied merchandise at Doshisha University. He joined Capcom in 1990 almost by accident: a friend had found a flyer for what looked like a job fair combined with a buffet. His first titles were modest — a Game Boy quiz game and a run of Disney-licensed projects — but the Super NES Aladdin became a breakthrough, selling more than 1.75 million copies worldwide. In 1993 he began directing the game that would define him. Resident Evil, released in 1996, drew on Sweet Home, an earlier Capcom horror game, and on films such as The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and The Evil Dead. It put the player in a mansion with fixed camera angles, scarce ammunition, limited inventory and enemies that took real effort to kill, and it made fear a function of resource management rather than just of monsters. It was the game that popularised the term "survival horror" and established its conventions for a decade. Mikami went on to produce the sequels, directed Dino Crisis in 1999 and the Resident Evil remake in 2002, and ran Capcom Production Studio 4. His Resident Evil 4 (2005) then dismantled many of the conventions he had created, moving the camera over the shoulder and reshaping third-person action games in the process. After Capcom he worked at Clover Studio and PlatinumGames and founded Tango Gameworks, directing God Hand, Vanquish and The Evil Within.