Game news Elden Ring: How did its creator go from accountant to developer of legendary games?
Before Elden Ring, before Dark Souls and Demon’s Souls, Hidetaka Miyazaki was an accountant. Back on an extraordinary journey.
He’s the man behind Demon’s Souls, Bloodborne,
Dark Souls, Elden Ring, behemoths of high standards and Gothic art. Before inheriting the title of genius creator, Hidetaka Miyazaki had a much more common daily life. How did the accountant of a computer company become one of the most influential personalities in the video game sphere?
D’Oracle à Ico
Born in 1974 from a poor family, the young Hidetaka Miyazaki spent his childhood in the modest neighborhoods of Shizuoka, a few hundred kilometers south of Tokyo, on the island of Honshū. His free time he spends devouring English-language novels from his local library. Since language fails him, he forces himself to imagine the stories of the books from their illustrations (The Guardian, 2015). Unconsciously, he gently cultivates his creative fiber. Fantasy and science fiction are his favorite genres, which he can only taste through reading.. Video games are forbidden to him by his parents until he enters college. So he savors his first interactive experiences with these books in which you are the hero as well as a handful of paper role-playing games such as Dungeons and Dragons. And while he abandons himself to his imaginary worlds, at the same time, it is almost mechanically that he joins Keio University to begin a course in social sciences. “Unlike most children in Japan, I had no dreams. I was not ambitious“, he says in the columns of The Guardian. At that moment, Miyazaki did not imagine himself as a storyteller and later preferred to join the ranks of Oracle Corporation, an American computer company. The post of accountant that he performs there allows him to finance the studies of his younger sister.
Ico, 2002
And now that he has his diploma in his pocket, Miyazaki has been able to experiment with his first video games. In 2001, one of them turns out to be a real revelation. At the urging of former classmates, he inserts into his PlayStation 2 Ico. The adventure is imagined by Fumito Ueda, an autodidact helped by a few artists completely outside the video game world. The work recounts the tribulations of Ico, banished from his tribe because of the horns he wears on his skull. The offspring crosses paths with Yorda, a young prisoner in a suspended cage. And between them begins a silent friendship that grows stronger as the challenges to be met under the threat of shadows. Ueda initiates in this game the formula of design under subtraction: from a concept, he imagines gameplay mechanics, to finish with the scenario. The rest, too superfluous, is removed. Miyazaki is bewitched. Ico really serves as a trigger. Maybe it was the story he needed to finally have a dream. And as he approaches his thirties, he quits his job as an accountant with no regrets for a much lower salary at FromSoftware.
It was (Ico) an experience, as well as a beautiful and untold story that I never would have imagined, and I’m so sorry for my friend, but I was moved and speechless. And that’s when I left the company I was working for at the time and started working for FromSoftware — Hidetaka Miyazaki for VGC.
“If my ideas failed, no one would care”
FromSoftware is still an obscure Tokyo studio when it hires Hidetaka Miyazaki as a coder. Before signing, he suffered a handful of refusals from other companies. Ema Kodaka, who takes care of the editing of her screenplays, recounts this arrival a few years later with great esteem: “In Japan, even today, people usually enter a company when they graduate and stay there for life. (…) It is a source of inspiration” (The Guardian). After having assigned him a range of tasks on the Armored Core series for several years, the beginner is entrusted with a project in difficulty. It’s time for Miyazaki to really prove himself; but it is a sinking ship that he has in his hands. The project is called Demon’s Souls. “If my ideas failed, no one would care. It was already a failure“, he shares to a journalist from the New Yorker. With the exception of its monsters and its threatening castles, the prototype lacks solid arguments. Miyazaki rolls up his sleeves, rewrites the entire game and founds its fundamental pillar: death. In the event of death, the player returns to the beginning of the level, weakened and without resources in the face of a still hostile world. Risk. The title was released in 2009 with some indifference. It is said that many onlookers at the Tokyo Game Show didn’t even have time to get past the character creation screen during a ten-minute demo. The president of Sony Entertainment will spend barely two hours on the game, without managing to go beyond the introduction. “This game is incredibly bad“, he cursed. Barely 20,000 copies are sold the week of launch.
The precision and heaviness of the game’s combat did not lend itself well to demonstrations; Miyazaki remembers the players shrugging their shoulders and walking away. The cover showed an Arthurian knight slumped against a wall – an image that suggested struggle and defeat, not heroism – and the game’s narrative was constructed from vague clues: descriptions of found objects, soliloquy of a dying enemy – New Yorker.
Yet the architecture and design of the game awaken a progressive interest in people’s minds. The technique is not perfect, but the tense confrontations amaze. And then, the players have the possibility of engraving messages of support on the ground against their comrades. We slowly understand that Demon’s Souls is a test of courage. “It is well known, from frustration is born desire then pleasure”, we wrote when writing our test, a year after the release of the game. Over the weeks, the title finds a few hundred thousand takers. And in 2011, Dark Souls, a sort of spiritual sequel, sold nearly two and a half million copies. Finally, Miyazaki hit hard. At FromSoftware, respect is essential. And three years later, the man was appointed president of the company.
Now that I’m president, he says, I get to meet a lot of other corporate presidents. They are such weird people. They fascinate me. I use some of them as enemy characters in our games.
The FromSoftware Identity
Hidetaka Miyazaki remporte le Lifetime Achievement Award (Golden Joystick Awards 2018 via Gamesradar)
The tenets of Dungeons & Dragons, Steve Jackson’s Witchcraft literary series, Ico…every significant lesson from Hidetaka Miyazaki’s life can be seen in his art today. If he lacked ambition as a child, the creator had nevertheless stored up enough fabulous stories from the Shizuoka library to shape his medieval universes. Bloodborne, released in 2015, will witness its fondness for more horrifying worlds. The title is also proof that the man is not afraid to start new projects. Most of his creations are also celebrations of the work of Kentaro Miura and his manga Berzerk. Like Guts facing the God Hands, FromSoftware heroes brave colossal dangers in similar imagery. And if we could finally believe that the trials of life of Miyazaki inspired the tumultuous paths of the Underworld and Lothric, the person concerned refuses this idea: “I wouldn’t say that my life story, to put it in grand terms, has affected the way I make games. A more accurate way of looking at things is problem solving. We all face problems in our daily lives. Finding answers is always satisfying. But in life, you know, there’s not much that gives us these feelings easily” (The New Yorker).
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I apologize to anyone who thinks there is too much to overcome in my games. I just want there to be as many players as possible who are able to feel the joy that comes from overcoming hardship.(The New Yorker) 2021.
The difficulty, “it is our identity”, Miyazaki will say. When the Dark Souls chapter is closed in 2016, it remains present in Sekiro, the FromSoftware with a deeply Japanese aesthetic. And with the exception of a more narrative essay on PSVR dubbed Uprooted, she is still the essence of the studio. But out of the question to speak of standard. “We don’t really feel like our games have set a standard. I’m not worried about others making similar games, it just shows that players wanted games like this, which are challenging”. From his first steps in the industry to his rise to the rank of president, Miyazaki has never stopped being humble. Before the publication of each of his jewels, he is anxious. During public exchanges, he is modest. Alex Donaldson, journalist for vg247, describes a man who receives compliments with a shy smile while chaining thanks. Three days before the release of Elden Ring, he confided in the columns of Le Monde: “I have doubts when my creations are attributed with such an influence on the industry”. A few weeks later, 12 million players have now roamed the Dunes of the Underworld. The universe is partly imagined by George RR Martin, an author he loved as a child when reading the Iron Thronefrom Voyage de Haviland Tufa and of Fevre Dream. The young bookworm works today alongside his heroes of yesteryear.
Source : New Yorker, The Guardian, VG 247Ducky (YouTube)