Resident Evil Creator Shinji Mikami Founds New Studio Unbound, Developing Original IP

Shinji Mikami, the director behind the original Resident Evil, its 2002 GameCube remake, and Resident Evil 4, has founded an independent studio called Unbound, which has been operating since May 2023 and is now actively recruiting for an unannounced original IP targeting PC and consoles.

The studio launched with roughly 50 to 53 staff, depending on the source, and has stated plans to expand to between 100 and 150 people. Mikami left Tango Gameworks, the studio he founded in 2010, in 2023, and Unbound appears to have been his immediate next move. Microsoft announced plans to close Tango in 2024 amid a broader wave of cutbacks, though the studio ultimately survived under Krafton, the South Korean publisher behind PUBG. Mikami had already departed before that decision came down, though he expressed surprise when it did. "I had thought the studio would be safe as long as they continued to make Hi-Fi Rush games," he told Ian Games. "That's one of the reasons I left."

Joining Mikami at Unbound is producer Masato Kimura, a longtime collaborator whose credits include Devil May Cry, Resident Evil, PN.03, Ghostwire: Tokyo, and Hi-Fi Rush. In a 2025 interview with Japanese job recruitment site Nidan Jump, machine translated by GamesRadar+, Kimura described the project Unbound is building: a large, super realistic action-RPG aimed at global release. The company's profile page lists additional staff with backgrounds on Silent Hill, Shadow of the Colossus, and Hi-Fi Rush, though no specific names beyond Kimura have been publicly attached to those credits.

The studio's public positioning on scale and budget is deliberately modest. In an older interview on Unbound's own site, Kimura acknowledged the studio doesn't have hundreds of billions of yen or hundreds of people, and described the goal as making AA games with aspirations toward a third A. The methodology Mikami has described is iterative and deliberately unstable by design. "Creating something new requires repeated trial and error, implementation and modification, tinkering, and sometimes even deletion," he said. "Because we create by repeatedly building and breaking, trying this and that, things don't always go as planned, and the content changes constantly. To put it in a positive way, it's a lively production style, a flexible development style. The programmers we work with have to be willing to put up with that all the way through, so we want people who enjoy that way of creating to join us."

Unbound's website features a looping mission statement in both Japanese and English. The fragment that has surfaced publicly reads: "He creates it in his own unique environment. It" — the text cuts off there, which fits the general pattern of the studio keeping its project details tightly controlled. Prior to Unbound, Mikami had founded a separate company called Kamuy with the stated intention of focusing on short release cycles led by younger talent and distancing himself from survival horror, according to a 2024 translation by Automaton. The relationship between Kamuy and Unbound has not been publicly clarified.

For a designer whose career spans from a Game Boy quiz title in 1990 through some of the most influential horror games ever made, the quietness around Unbound is striking. The studio has been building in plain sight for nearly three years without a single trailer or title announcement. Given Mikami's track record, that restraint is probably the most interesting thing about it right now.