Who is Hidetaka Miyazaki?

An Oracle account manager who played Ico at 29, and was running the studio a decade later.

Hidetaka Miyazaki was born on September 19, 1974 in Shizuoka, and took a social science degree at Keio University. He worked as an account manager for the US company Oracle, a job he kept partly to pay his sister’s college tuition, until a friend’s recommendation put Ico in front of him in the early 2000s and he decided, at 29, with no industry experience, to become a game designer. Almost nobody would hire him. FromSoftware would.

He joined in 2004, mid-development on Armored Core: Last Raven, directed Armored Core 4 and For Answer, then took over the failing fantasy project that became Demon’s Souls. Dark Souls followed, then Bloodborne, Sekiro, and Elden Ring, and in May 2014, the company presidency. Journalists reach for the word auteur; the studio’s results keep agreeing with them.

Hidetaka Miyazaki at The Game Awards 2022 — **HIDETAKA MIYAZAKI** Hidetaka Miyazaki, photographed at The Game Awards 2022, the night Elden Ring took Game of the Year.

THE RECORD

Director, by year

2006 · Armored Core 4

His directorial debut, on the studio’s flagship mecha series. The Souls games’ director was trained on robots, budgets, and part-by-part machine building, an apprenticeship visible in every equipment screen since.

2009 · Demon’s Souls

The rescue job. He writes the majority of the story, dialogue and text on his projects and holds final say on character, monster and level design; the method starts here.

2019 · Sekiro

Game of the Year at The Game Awards. A year earlier he had received the Golden Joystick Lifetime Achievement Award, presented by Ian Livingstone and Steve Jackson, two of the gamebook authors he grew up reading.

2023 · TIME 100

Time named him one of the 100 most influential people of 2023: only the second game developer ever listed, after Shigeru Miyamoto in 2007.

Who is Hidetaka Miyazaki?

THE RECORD

THE FIRST WORD