Hidetaka Miyazaki is a name that echoes through the gaming world, thanks to his major contributions to shaping the Souls genre and lifting FromSoftware off the ground. But before shaping the industry with masterpieces like Dark Souls, Bloodborne, and Elden Ring, Hidetaka Miyazaki was working a comfortable, stable job at Oracle in the United States.
Despite doing well in the US, Miyazaki likely longed for more, which is why all it took was a single video game to take a massive pay cut and move to work as a programmer at FromSoftware. If the gaming industry were to be related to Marvel, this switching of jobs would possibly be a canon event.
Hidetaka Miyazaki and his pay cut that revolutionised the gaming world
Hidetaka Miyazaki took a massive pay cut to work at FromSoftware | Nintendo
Before joining FromSoftware back in 2004, Hidetaka Miyazaki was living the corporate reality everyone dreams of. However, despite doing well, the now-renowned director felt like doing more with his life at the time, an emotion he felt after playing a certain game.
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In an interview with The Guardian, Miyazaki revealed how his former college mates recommended him to play Ico, an iconic fairytale title, which made him want to make a game himself:
That game awoke me to the possibilities of the medium, I wanted to make one myself.
To follow this dream, the director then applied to FromSoftware, a relatively unknown Japanese game company at the time, as a programmer for the lesser-known mech series called Armored Core. Released in 2005, Armored Core: Last Raven became the first game that roll with credits to Hidetaka Miyazaki at the end.
How Hidetaka Miyazaki made a name for himself
Demon’s Souls was Hidetaka Miyazaki’s first Souls game | FromSoftware
The job at FromSoftware came with a massive pay cut, but it allowed Hidetaka Miyazaki to chase a passion he had been longing for a while. After working on the Armored Core series, the director gradually made his way up the ladder, before he was ultimately made the president of the studio in 2014.
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Back when Demon’s Souls was having a hard time executing, Miyazaki jumped on the opportunity to work on it as he found the idea of a fantasy action role-playing game very exciting. He then helped the studio build the game’s prototypes, ultimately taking over the direction and laying a foundation stone for the Souls genre.
Today, Hidetaka Miyazaki is hailed as one of gaming’s most influential creators. His works have redefined difficulty and the idea of dying with purpose in video games. But it all traces back to Ico, the game that started it all by inspiring him to achieve more with his life.
This post belongs to FandomWire and first appeared on FandomWire
