I don’t think anyone reading these hallowed pages actually judges games by their sales numbers, but it’s nice to hear this perspective affirmed by no less a legendary Fightguy than Katsuhiro Harada, the former face of Tekken. Out of the blue, Harada posted some very nice words about the king of Dark Souls and president of FromSoftware, Hidetaki Miyazaki, noting that Miyazaki came late to game development and worked on a bunch of less lauded or successful games, before finding success with Souls.
Harada (who is currently CEO of SNK VS Studio) makes the obvious but eminently replicable argument that these older, less famous projects paved the way for the Souls series. He accuses those who have a disparaging opinion of them of being unable to “appreciate the journey or growth of the developers themselves.” It’s unclear exactly who these statements are aimed at, but Harada adds that he is “NOT talking about the fan community.” All of this seems like a rebuke to publisher financiers who are only thinking about the next earnings call.
Write on Xitter in response to a fan question, Harada describes Miyazaki’s career path as “exceptionally unusual” – after all, he started in the industry after he turned 30 and did not work at one of the “major development studios that held a significant technological advantage at the start of the polygon era.”
For context, Miyazaki contributed to three OK-ish Armored Core games before beating the critics with Demon’s Souls in 2009. FromSoftware as a whole dates back to 1994. The studio had worked on dozens of games, including the sadly forgotten Tenchu and the horror game Echo Night, before Miyazaki joined their ranks as a designer. In particular, From’s long-running and underappreciated action-RPG series King’s Field is an obvious precursor to the Souls universe, boasting similarly labyrinthine world design and a pervasive air of sadness.
Harada says he “has been personally involved with the Dark Souls series and Elden Ring”, serving as general manager of publisher Bandai Namco, although he never laid a finger on the development itself. “From this point of view, I can say that Dark Souls did not become a huge success overnight,” he says. “It was the result of everything Miyazaki and his team had built over their previous titles.
“Today he gets offers from all over the world,” Harada continues, “but when I think back to when he and his team were struggling the most, a lot of those offers seem to come from people who only know who they are today. Some of them almost feel like a complete reversal of attitude. Well, that’s just my personal view.
“Personally, I was tired of people just comparing games by saying things like, ‘This title cost X billion yen to make and sold Y million copies,’ and then only using those numbers to judge them against other games,” Harada complains. “There were so many people who couldn’t appreciate the journey or growth of the developers themselves. Anyone can look at the current numbers, they’re available to everyone. Whenever I heard those kinds of opinions, I always thought, ‘That’s exactly what you’d expect from someone who’s never actually developed games.’
Again, all of these sentiments are pretty obvious, but it’s nice to hear them at a time when the industry is experiencing yet another brain drain of veteran developers. Sony just got rid of more than half the Destiny 2 team, for example, and these are some of the best FPS designers you’ll find anywhere. No doubt, gutting a studio like Bungie makes sense when viewed through the icy prisms of revenue and cost projections, but that literally represents centuries of accumulated expertise that you’re not getting back.
