Hidetaka Miyazaki

Hidetaka Miyazaki (宮崎 英高, born September 19, 1974) is a Japanese video game director, designer, scriptwriter, and president of the developer FromSoftware — best known for creating the Dark Souls series and directing the fantasy games that established the Soulslike genre.¹³ He joined FromSoftware in 2004 and became its president in 2014, a rise from mid-career hire to company head that observers have called unprecedented in Japan.⁹¹³

Miyazaki grew up “tremendously poor” in the city of Shizuoka?, about 100 miles south-west of Tokyo.¹ His office-worker parents could not afford books or manga, so he borrowed whatever he could from the library, often ending up with English-language fantasy and science fiction beyond his reading level.¹² He filled the gaps he could not understand with his own imagination, using the accompanying illustrations, an experience he later described as co-writing the fiction and which he sought to reproduce in his games.¹¹⁸ Prohibited from playing video games at home as a child, he instead absorbed manga and text-based adventure books, and cites the gamebook Sorcery! and the manga Berserk? among his formative influences.¹⁸

He studied social science at Keio University?, then took a job as an analyst and account manager at the American IT company Oracle?, partly to help pay for his younger sister’s college education.¹² Around 2001, at the urging of former college friends, he played Fumito Ueda?’s Ico?, a minimalist fairy tale about a boy leading a girl by the hand through a castle.¹² The game, he said, “awoke me to the possibilities of the medium,” and he resolved to make games himself.¹

At 29 he was too old for graduate positions and too inexperienced for other work; FromSoftware was one of the few companies that would hire him, at a considerable drop in pay.¹⁹ He started as a coder in 2004, working first as a planner on Armored Core: Last Raven? and making his directorial debut on Armored Core 4? in 2006.¹³¹⁵ During that period he heard of a struggling fantasy action role-playing game elsewhere in the studio; because the project was already considered a lost cause, he was allowed to take it over with full creative control.⁹¹³

Demon’s Souls and the Souls games

Miyazaki “changed pretty much everything” about that project, which became Demon’s Souls, released in 2009.⁹ He built the game around punishing difficulty and a system in which death returns the player, weakened and with resources lost, to a checkpoint while every enemy respawns.² Its narrative was conveyed obliquely — through item descriptions, a dying foe’s soliloquy, and environmental cues rather than explicit exposition.² Poorly suited to demos and given a disastrous reception at the Tokyo Game Show, the game nonetheless earned a word-of-mouth following and became FromSoftware’s most successful title to that point.¹¹³

Its spiritual successor, Dark Souls, followed in 2011 and became a sensation, selling nearly 2.5 million copies within eighteen months.² Miyazaki designed it around a “fully seamless world” that intertwined the discrete stages of Demon’s Souls into one continuous map, expanded the enemy roster from around 30 types to close to 100, and lengthened play time to about 60 hours.⁵ He conceived its online systems around a “shared play experience” meant to recreate the feeling of players struggling together, and drew a contrast with the open fields of Bethesda’s Oblivion, describing his world instead as a full dungeon.⁵ Dark Souls was published internationally by Bandai Namco while FromSoftware retained control of all content.⁵

Miyazaki served only in a supervisory capacity on Dark Souls II? (2014), which was co-directed by Yui Tanimura and Tomohiro Shibuya; fans commonly criticized the sequel for lacking “the Miyazaki touch”.³¹⁰ He returned to direct Bloodborne? (2015), set in a meticulously detailed, rain-soaked Victorian world of Gothic architecture and demonic mutations, and later confirmed he would direct Dark Souls III? (2016).⁸³ His subsequent directorial work includes the PlayStation VR title Déraciné? (2018), the feudal-Japan action game Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice? (2019), and Elden Ring? (2022).¹³¹⁵

The Dark Souls games became notorious for their difficulty, with the phrase “the Dark Souls of X” entering wider use to describe any onerous task.² Miyazaki has defended this as central to his work, saying hardship is “what gives meaning to the experience” and “our identity,” while expressing regret toward players who find his games too hard.²⁸ His stated goal is to give players “the sense of accomplishment and achievement that comes with overcoming the hardest challenges a game can present”.⁸

Influences and legacy

Miyazaki’s influences span novelists, manga artists, and game designers including Fumito Ueda and Yuji Horii?.¹⁴ Beyond Ico, he has drawn on world architecture, long-running series such as The Legend of Zelda and Dragon Quest, and authors including H. P. Lovecraft?, Bram Stoker?, and George R. R. Martin? — with whom he later collaborated on Elden Ring — as well as the manga Berserk.¹³ His games take the basics of Dungeons & Dragons — combat, monsters, and exploration — and place them in intricate, hostile worlds populated by Lovecraftian beasts.¹ His personal office holds Magic: The Gathering cards, a Dungeons & Dragons guide, and the board game Arkham Horror alongside other tabletop games.¹⁷

Regarded as an auteur of the medium, Miyazaki is credited with fathering the Soulslike genre.¹⁴ In 2019 the public voted Dark Souls the greatest game of all time at the Golden Joystick Awards, ahead of Tetris, Doom, and Super Mario 64.² Elden Ring sold 20 million copies within its first year and swept Game of the Year honors at The Game Awards, the DICE Awards, and the Game Developers Choice Awards.¹⁶ In 2023 he was named one of Time magazine’s 100 most influential people, in a tribute written by Naughty Dog’s Neil Druckmann — only the second game developer, after Shigeru Miyamoto, to appear on the list.¹⁶

Miyazaki is a private figure who rarely gives interviews and refuses to appear on film, saying he sees “very little value” in presenting himself and prefers to be expressed through his games.⁹¹⁷ He describes himself as an indoor person and a perfectionist who spends his free time playing games — favoring open-world RPGs, simulation titles, and Civilization — as well as reading and cooking.¹⁷