Video Games

Shinji Mikami says he “should get to work”

Game designer left Tango Gameworks earlier this year

Marco Wutz

Shinji Mikami says he “should get to work”
Shinji Mikami says he “should get to work” /

Japanese game designer Shinji Mikami indicated that he’d return to work soon in a post on social media. “Now that I've broken the spell of non-competition on myself,” he wrote, “I guess I should get to work.”

Mikami left Tango Gameworks earlier this year and seems to have signed a non-compete upon leaving, which kept him from taking up another position in the industry immediately. He founded Tango back in 2010 and most recently served as the company’s CEO as well as leading game development projects The Evil Within, The Evil Within 2, and Ghostwire: Tokyo. He was also the executive producer of Hi-Fi Rush.

Before founding Tango Gameworks, Mikami worked at Capcom, where he was instrumental in creating the iconic Resident Evil franchise.

Shinji Mikami's selfie inside a hotel room.
Mikami has been traveling through Japan for the last few months / Shinji Mikami

No concrete plans have been communicated by Mikami as of yet, though he’s on the record as saying that he’d love to direct one more game before retiring from the business.

Mikami spent the last months traveling and playing video games – he specifically posted about Ghost of Tsushima, Resident Evil 4 Remake, and The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom – as he was waiting for his non-compete contract to run out.

Mikami’s colleague Hideki Kamiya has left Platinum Games recently and is going through quite a similar downtime, though his non-compete contract will likely last into next year.

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Marco Wutz
MARCO WUTZ

Marco Wutz is a writer from Parkstetten, Germany. He has a degree in Ancient History and a particular love for real-time and turn-based strategy games like StarCraft, Age of Empires, Total War, Age of Wonders, Crusader Kings, and Civilization as well as a soft spot for Genshin Impact and Honkai: Star Rail. He began covering StarCraft 2 as a writer in 2011 for the largest German community around the game and hosted a live tournament on a stage at gamescom 2014 before he went on to work for Bonjwa, one of the country's biggest Twitch channels. He branched out to write in English in 2015 by joining tl.net, the global center of the StarCraft scene run by Team Liquid, which was nominated as the Best Coverage Website of the Year at the Esports Industry Awards in 2017. He worked as a translator on The Crusader Stands Watch, a biography in memory of Dennis "INTERNETHULK" Hawelka, and provided live coverage of many StarCraft 2 events on the social channels of tl.net as well as DreamHack, the world's largest gaming festival. From there, he transitioned into writing about the games industry in general after his graduation, joining GLHF, a content agency specializing in video games coverage for media partners across the globe, in 2021. He has also written for NGL.ONE, kicker, ComputerBild, USA Today's ForTheWin, The Sun, Men's Journal, and Parade. Email: marco.wutz@glhf.gg

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