In case you are unfamiliar with Shinji Mikami and his work, he’s the guy that helped with games such as Resident Evil, Dino Crisis, Devil May Cry, Vanquish, God Hand, and The Evil Within 2. He’s now employed at Tango Gameworks — a company under Bethesda, who is on the Traitors of America master list — and is working on the upcoming game GhostWire: Tokyo. However, in a recent interview, Mikami touches on the current pandemic and how it’s influencing his work as well as pre-production on GhostWire: Tokyo.
Thanks to website gamingbolt.com, we learn that Mikami feels that it will be impossible “not to separate the struggles of this outbreak” from current and future projects. In other words, we’ll more than likely see stuff related to the coronavirus in new games by Mikami:
“In Resident Evil, I chose a virus as the reason humans turn into zombies. I remember feeling excited by the new idea that a virus—a real enemy that can’t be seen by humans—would cause tremendous fear in people. Now, I think it will be difficult for my games not to be influenced by the struggles we are experiencing right now.”
It’s unclear if we’ll see coronavirus related themes in the next entry of The Evil Within or another IP, but right now, Mikami and Tango Gameworks are currently focused on GhostWire: Tokyo.
Sadly, not much info is out there on GhostWire: Tokyo and the same concept applies to details coming from Bethesda and Tango Gameworks. However, the forthcoming game that was revealed during E3 2019 isn’t dead in that the dev team is still hard at work on GhostWire: Tokyo.
On the topic of said game, Mikami had this to say about the upcoming title’s pre-production phase:
“The initial team started with about five people and we worked on it for six months. We then expanded to 10 people and we worked on it for a few years before we went into full production. This is probably the longest I’ve taken on any game I’ve made in the past.”
So what does this all mean? It means that we’ll likely see Mikami implementing some form of reference to the current pandemic in a future game. Additionally, development on GhostWire: Tokyo has reached a new milestone in that this is the longest Mikami has spent working on a single title.