Hidetaka Miyazaki

Hidetaka Miyazaki (宮崎 英高) is a Japanese creative director, designer, writer, and president of the video game company FromSoftware.

Miyazaki was born on September 19, 1974, and grew up in Shizuoka, Japan.

He later attended Keio University and graduated with a degree in social science, later getting a job as an account manager for the US-based Oracle Corporation to pay for his sister's college tuition fees.

Upon a friend's recommendation, Miyazaki played the 2001 video game Ico, which caused him to want a career change as a game designer.

Miyazaki found that few game companies would employ him at age 29 with no experience working in the industry, with one of the few being FromSoftware.

He joined the company in 2004 and was a designer for the Armored Core series before receiving wider recognition for creating the Dark Souls series.

He began working there as a planner on Armored Core: Last Raven in 2004, joining the game's development midway through.

He later directed Armored Core 4 and its direct sequel, Armored Core: For Answer.

Upon learning about what later became Demon's Souls, Miyazaki became excited at the prospect of a fantasy action role-playing game and offered to help.

The project, up until he was assigned to it, was considered a failure by the company.

He believed the company's outlook on the game allowed him to take full control of the project as any further failed ideas would not hurt it.

Although the game was received negatively at the 2009 Tokyo Game Show and sold far under expectations upon release, it began to pick up after a few months and soon found publishers willing to release the game outside of Japan.

Miyazaki has a son who was born in the late 2010s.

After the success of the game's spiritual successor Dark Souls, released in 2011, Miyazaki was promoted to the position of company president in May 2014.

It was considered unprecedented for a person to change careers in Japan and become company president within 10 years.

In 2012, Sony Computer Entertainment approached FromSoftware concerning cooperative development on a new game.

Miyazaki asked about the possibility of developing a game for eighth-generation consoles, and the concept of Bloodborne developed from there.

Even though there were no story or setting connections to FromSoftware's previous games, Miyazaki said that it carried the "DNA" of Demon's Souls and its specific level design.

Development ran parallel to that of Dark Souls II, which Miyazaki supervised only as he was unable to direct both games simultaneously.

Miyazaki was promoted to company president in 2014 and also serves as its representative director.

Other games he has directed include Demon's Souls, Bloodborne, Sekiro, and Elden Ring, which have all received critical acclaim.

Miyazaki's influences range across the works of various novelists, manga artists, and game designers such as Fumito Ueda and Yuji Horii.

His games often invoke the use of high difficulty and narratives presented largely through flavor text and environmental cues as opposed to dialogue.

Regarded as an auteur of video games, his work is cited as influential and has led to the creation of the Soulslike subgenre of games.

After the release of Bloodborne in March 2015, Miyazaki returned to the Dark Souls series as the lead director on Dark Souls III, which released early the following year.

After its release, he announced his intentions to personally stop development on the Dark Souls series.

His next two projects were the 2018 virtual reality game Déraciné and the 2019 action-adventure game Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice, with the latter winning several awards.

It was also around this time that he had his first child.

Miyazaki also directed Elden Ring, written in collaboration with American author George R. R. Martin.

The game sold more than 20 million copies in a year and won several Game of the Year awards.

Miyazaki served as the initial director of Armored Core VI: Fires of Rubicon (2023) before Masaru Yamamura assumed the role.

Miyazaki was an avid reader as a child despite his parents being unable to afford him many books.

He frequently borrowed from his local library, including English language fantasy and science fiction that he did not fully understand, allowing his imagination to fill in the blanks by using the accompanying illustrations.

He would later cite that as a major influence on his design philosophy.

Miyazaki also played gamebooks and tabletop games such as Steve Jackson's Sorcery!, Dungeons & Dragons, and RuneQuest as his parents restricted him from playing video games until he was old enough to attend university.

Once exposed to video games, Miyazaki became a fan of Ico, the early Dragon Quest games, and The Legend of Zelda and King's Field video game series, all of which he later cited were direct influences on his games.

He was also a fan of manga such as Berserk, Saint Seiya, JoJo's Bizarre Adventure, and Devilman, as well as the literature of H. P. Lovecraft, Bram Stoker, and George R. R. Martin.

Miyazaki is also inspired by architecture, especially of European origin, and often uses it in his games as a way of environmental storytelling.

Psychology, anthropology, and sociology have also influenced his design choices.

As the lead creative director on a project, Miyazaki usually writes the majority of the story, dialogue, and text, while having the final say on character, monster, and level designs.