Hideki Kamiya

Hideki Kamiya (神谷 英樹) is a Japanese video game designer and director.

Kamiya was born in 1970 in Matsumoto in Nagano Prefecture.

At a young age, he was already a fan of video games thanks to a neighbor who often invited him to play with his Epoch Cassette Vision console.

Gaming appealed to Kamiya mainly due to the sounds it produced.

During his early years of junior school he got his own first console, Nintendo's Famicom.

The first game he bought was Nuts & Milk.

In high school, Kamiya bought a NEC PC-8801 to study programming, but ended up playing video games every day.

The first software he purchased for his PC-8801 MA computer was Hydlide 3: The Space Memories.

He also loved monster movies such as Godzilla and Ultraman as a child.

As a game designer, Kamiya stated he has been most inspired by the games The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past and Gradius.

His favorite action game is the original Castlevania.

Other favorite games include Space Harrier, Cybernator, Punch-Out, Wonder Boy in Monster Land, Snatcher, Sorcerian, and Star Cruiser.

When reading an interview from the Family Computer Magazine that featured game creators Shigeru Miyamoto and Masanobu Endo, Kamiya decided he would become a video game developer.

After graduating from college, Kamiya applied for jobs at various game developers.

He was turned down by Sega and had an application accepted by Namco.

However, Namco wanted him to be an artist rather than a game designer.

He began his career in 1994 with Capcom, where he directed Resident Evil 2 (1998), Devil May Cry (2001), Viewtiful Joe (2003), and Ōkami (2006).

Kamiya joined Capcom as a designer in 1994.

His early works included planner of the original Resident Evil.

The development of Resident Evil 2 was carried out by a 40- to 50-person group that would later be part of Capcom Production Studio 4.

The game was directed by Kamiya, who led the team, which was composed of newer Capcom employees and over half of the staff from the original Resident Evil.

In the initial stages of development, producer Shinji Mikami often had creative disagreements with Kamiya, and tried to influence the team with his own direction.

He eventually stepped back to an overseeing role as producer, and only demanded to be shown the current build once a month.

To fulfill Capcom's sales plan of two million copies, director Kamiya tried to attract new customers with a more ostentatious and Hollywood-like story presentation.

As Yoshiki Okamoto did not want to simply enforce the new direction, he had regular series writer Noboru Sugimura discuss the plot revisions with Mikami and the development staff.

The planners redesigned the game from the ground up to fit the changes, and the programmers and other remaining members of the team were sent to work on Resident Evil Director's Cut, which was shipped with a playable preview disc of the new Resident Evil 2 version in order to promote the sequel and to apologize to the players for its belated release.

Kamiya was later the director of Devil May Cry, which started out as the earliest incarnation of Resident Evil 4.

Initially developed for the PlayStation 2, the game was directed by Hideki Kamiya after producer Shinji Mikami requested that he create a new entry in the Resident Evil series.

Around the turn of the millennium, Sugimura created a scenario for the title, based on Kamiya's idea to make a very cool and stylized action game.

The story was based on unraveling the mystery surrounding the body of protagonist Tony, an invincible man with skills and an intellect exceeding that of normal people, his superhuman abilities explained with biotechnology.

As Kamiya felt the playable character did not look brave and heroic enough in battles from a fixed angle, he decided to drop the prerendered backgrounds from previous Resident Evil installments and instead opted for a dynamic camera system.

This new direction required the team to make a trip to Europe where they spent eleven days in the United Kingdom and Spain photographing things like Gothic statues, bricks, and stone pavements for use in textures.

Though the developers tried to make the "coolness" theme fit into the world of Resident Evil, Mikami felt it strayed too far from the series' survival horror roots and gradually convinced all of the staff members to make the game independent from it.

Kamiya eventually rewrote the story to be set in a world full of demons and changed the hero's name to "Dante".

The cast of characters remained largely identical to that in Sugimura's scenario, although appearances of the hero's mother and father were written out of the story.

From 2004 to 2006, he worked for the Capcom subsidiary Clover Studio.

After leaving Capcom, Kamiya and other former staff members founded PlatinumGames in 2006.

His projects with PlatinumGames include Bayonetta (2009) and The Wonderful 101 (2013).

He was named one of the top 100 game creators of all-time by IGN in 2009.

Kamiya also served as vice president from 2017 to 2023.