Tango Gameworks: A Decade Later

Introduction

Shinji Mikami is finally able to realize his vision of Tango Gameworks after a long time.

Mikami established Tango in 2010 after nearly two decades at Capcom, directing games like Resident Evil and Resident Evil 4, and a few years contracting for Platinum Games, where he directed Vanquish. His goal: To give opportunities to younger developers and allow them to create their games. He said it bluntly: PolygonIn 2014, people should not play direct games.

“If you’re over 40, you’re somewhat out of touch with the people buying your games,” Mikami told the outlet, “and when you’re young, you don’t know enough about the industry. When you’re in your 30s, you have the right balance – you’re energetic and have your ego and can focus without distractions, but you have enough experience to manage people and know the business.”

Charitably, it actually took seven years for Mikami’s vision to become real, marked by the release of The Evil Within 2 in 2017, directed by John Johanas. More cynically, and if you’re Mikami himself – now 56 – it took 12 years. Nevertheless, as he sees it, Tango’s here now. Ghostwire: Tokyo is its latest title.

Tango Gameworks’ latest game, Ghostwire: Tokyo

Early in Tango’s history, Mikami gave many interviews about his vision. However, at the time it was still a vision. Although it was highly speculative, the idea is not supported by any evidence. However, in the run-up to Ghostwire’s release, and with the advantage of 12 years of hindsight, we decided to revisit Tango’s mission statement. Talking to three higher-ups within the company – Mikami, producer Masato Kimura, and Ghostwire director Kinji Kimura – we learned how Tango finally got here and what it plans to do next.

The Dream Funding

The funding of the Dream

As noble as his intentions may have been when founding Tango, Mikami directed the studio’s debut project, the survival horror game The Evil Within, released in 2014.

Mikami is the first person to say that he likes to direct games. But he’ll also tell you that in the case of The Evil Within, him sitting in the director’s chair had less to do with a personal investment in the project and more to do with business.

Source of the image: Tango Gameworks

Shinji Mikami

“I’m not sure if I’m allowed to say this, but I did need to be the director in order to manage the completely new team under this new studio,” he tells Game Informer via a translator. “And also, there was this thinking where I probably needed to be the director in order for the funding to come in.”

The game was promoted as Mikami’s return to survival horror. A genre that he invented and popularized with Resident Evil 1, Mikami wasted his post-Capcom years refusing proposals for horror games. Even in the case of The Evil Within, Mikami tells us, “at the time, yeah, if there was a chance not to work on a horror game, then maybe I would’ve considered that.”

“It’s not bad,” he adds. “It’s just; I wish I could’ve raised the quality a little bit more.”

After The Evil Within, John Johanas was the first new director within Tango to get the chance to lead a project – at least that we’ve heard. His path to this position is not very conventional. Johanas joined Tango just a few months after its founding in August 2010. Before joining, he was an English teacher for Japan’s JET Program, a government program built to teach foreign languages in Japan (and a common way for people to get working visas to move to the country).

Source of the image: Tango Gameworks

Masato Kimura

Johanas translated a “huge” Japanese novel into English as part of his application process, gifting it to the studio head. Mikami was surprised, but admits he wasn’t interested in Johanas being an English teacher. Not to mention, he doesn’t read the language. Johanas nonetheless got the job. “[I] saw there was passion in his eyes,” Mikami says.

Johannes worked for three to four years on game design documents, and later levels for The Evil Within. When Tango had an opportunity to develop DLC, director duty went to Johanas, who led development on “The Consequence” and “The Assignment,” both released in 2015. The Evil Within 2 was a complete game that he directed, which was both critically and commercially successful.

Johanas, who is currently working on the next game in his role as director at the studio, marks the first public announcement of a developer as director of multiple projects. “He’s entering his prime,” Masato says.

But Johanas is certainly not the most recognizable name from Mikami’s stable of new directors. Ikumi Naramura would be the one to blame. But it’s complicated. And ropes in Tango’s latest director, Kinji Kimura.

Politics

Politics

On paper, Nakamura seems like the ideal director for Mikami’s vision. By the time she got to Tango, she’d had a long career in the game industry – also at Capcom and Platinum, though she didn’t work directly with Mikami – helping develop the extremely well-liked Ōkami at the former and Bayonetta at the latter. According to Mikami, based on her work as a concept artist on The Evil Within, Nakamura’s talent was “above and beyond” other developers. “The next step for her was definitely to be the director,” he says.

His instincts were correct – and then some.

At E3 2019, Nakamura announced her directorial debut, Ghostwire: Tokyo, during Bethesda’s press conference. Because of her charming and funny speech, Nakamura became an instant Internet celebrity. It made Nakamura one of the more-recognizable game developers in recent years, and it also put her new project on people’s radar. “Considering the game industry at the time, it was pretty clear that if she were to come on stage as a creative director, she would become very popular at a speed much faster than anyone else,” Mikami says.

Even though his intuitions were right, fate was not pleased. Nakamura, who had been with Tango Gameworks for two years, left Tango Gameworks in September 2019.

Nakamura’s departure is complicated and something we spoke to her in-depth about in 2021. Alongside the health issues she was experiencing, Nakamura struggled under the pressure of developer-publisher relationships; she didn’t like the stress of Bethesda, Tango’s parent company, having complete control over her project.

Image source: Ikumi Nakamura

Behind-the-scenes look at Ikumi Nakamura at E3

“I was a creative director, so this is literally my baby,” Nakamura told us. “My four-year-old baby. So, to let that go – ask any mother to let her baby go. It was that gut-ripping.”

As to be expected, the Tango employees we talked to wish Nakamura the best in her career; she’s listed in the “Special Thanks” portion of Ghostwire’s credits. Nakamura officially announced Unseen her independent studio shortly before her previous project was released. This marks the next step in her career. “She made the world and art for Ghostwire, and we very much appreciate the work that she’s done,” Mikami says.

Kinji Kimura, who began on Ghostwire as a game designer, took Nakaura’s place. There was a steep learning curve when he started his new job. Kinji points to Mikami often as a mentor when it comes time to how to manage a game. That’s not to say Mikami isn’t also taking lessons from his younger staff.

Get bored, but you can still be powerful

Get bored, but you can still be powerful

If there’s one thing that comes up repeatedly in our interviews with Tango, it’s the idea of the customer experience. And almost every time it’s brought up by Masato and Kinji, they immediately point back to Mikami.

“His mentality goes far deeper in regards to customer experience than everybody else probably thinks,” Kinji says. “That has been a very big learning experience for me.”

Image Source: Tango Gameworks

Kenji Kimura

Masato says that Mikami is a skeptic in his role as Tango’s executive producer. He stays in the background; he’s a few steps behind, watching over things.

However, Mikami has a lot of experience directing video games – a few of them considered the best, or at least most influential, of all time. Even if he isn’t currently in the director’s chair, that experience isn’t going to waste; it’s passed down to a newer generation.

On Ghostwire, Kinji says Mikami was instrumental in teaching him how to focus on the customer experience, be “adamant” about achieving quality, and deal with the stresses of being a director. He learned how to reject ideas.

“I’ve learned about the responsibilities of what we need to focus on,” Kinji says. “Sometimes that’s a very difficult decision to make, but it’s all in [service] of trying to hone down on the customer experience.”

Mikami claims that he selected Kinji as Ghostwire’s replacement because of his capacity to understand and process complex information. It helped that he was also passionate about creating a great game. Mikami also believes he is a healthy and strong mental person, something that he seeks in directors.

Now that he’s had a chance to see two of his directors successfully ship games, Mikami says he’s also learned from the younger members of his staff. It is easy to answer this question by learning how work from home more effectively, which is an outcome of the COVID-19 pandemic. But also a surprising answer: Mikami says he’s learning how to be more selfish.

“It’s probably more of a reminder,” he says. “But as I get to this age, it gets harder and harder to be selfish about what I want to make.”

This begs the obvious question: Does Mikami envision himself as directing another video game? Yes. He’s said as much in other interviews, recently telling VG247 that he wants to make “at least” one more game. However, he tells us that it might be more than one.

Tango Gameworks’ latest game, Ghostwire: Tokyo

“I think it would be plural,” Mikami says. “I’m not thinking about when to actually stop, or making the last [game]. I probably would not be able to just stop.”

“I’ve been working with Mikami-san for a very long time,” Masato follows up. “I can tell you that he is probably going to be making something for the rest of his life.”

Time will show if Mikami is back as director. Masato told VG247 in the same interview mentioned above that Mikami will not lead Tango’s next game. That might be Johanas’ new project, which Mikami recently told Weekly Famitsu (via Video Games Chronicle) is “the complete opposite of horror.”

Either way, 12 years after first establishing his vision, Mikami’s track record stands solid; two out of three isn’t a bad number. Masato views this unique approach to game development, however. Tango does things differently. He says it starts with Mikami who, according to him gets bored easily.

“But in a very powerful way,” Masato says. “He wants to do something new all the time. He’s looking for something cool and new. The idea is the first thing that comes to mind. It all starts with the gameplan, which will be the blueprint for the game. A good game director is someone who has an excellent plan. It’s always about the game and the game design. It’s always the game and its design that comes first. That’s why you’ll see us being a little bit different from other studios. We do see that as an advantage.”

Original publication of this article was Issue 345, Game Informer.