Dating & Relationship status

After the release of Bloodborne in March 2015, Miyazaki returned to the Souls series as the director on Dark Souls III (2016), with assistance from Steel Battalion: Heavy Armor and Dark Souls II directors Isamu Okano and Yui Tanimura, respectively. After its release, Miyazaki stated his intentions to personally stop development on the Souls series. His next two projects were the 2018 virtual reality game Déraciné and the 2019 action-adventure game Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice. At the 2018 Golden Joystick Awards ceremony, he was awarded the show’s Lifetime Achievement Award for his contributions to the video game industry. The award was presented to him by Ian Livingstone and Steve Jackson, two of his design influences. Miyazaki is also set to direct the action role-playing game Elden Ring, written in collaboration with A Song of Ice and Fire series author George R. R. Martin.

Upon learning about what later became Demon’s Souls, Miyazaki became excited at the prospect of a fantasy action role-playing game and offered to help. The project, up until Miyazaki was assigned to it, was considered a failure by the company, with Miyazaki stating “I figured if I could find a way to take control of the game, I could turn it into anything I wanted. Best of all, if my ideas failed, nobody would care – it was already a failure.” Although the game was received negatively at the 2009 Tokyo Game Show and sold far under expectations upon release, it began to pick up after a few months and soon found publishers willing to release the title outside of Japan. After the release and success of the game’s spiritual successor Dark Souls in 2011, Miyazaki was promoted to the position of company president in May 2014.

After the release of the Prepare to Die edition of Dark Souls in August 2012, Sony Computer Entertainment approached FromSoftware concerning cooperative development on a new title. Miyazaki asked about the possibility of developing a game for eighth-generation consoles, and the concept of Bloodborne developed from there. There were no story or setting connections to FromSoftware’s previous games, even though Miyazaki conceded that it carried the “DNA” of Demon’s Souls and its specific level design. Development ran parallel to that of Dark Souls II, which Miyazaki supervised only as he was unable to direct both games simultaneously.

Hidetaka Miyazaki (宮崎 英高 , Miyazaki Hidetaka, born in Shizuoka, Japan) is a Japanese video game director, designer, writer, and company president of FromSoftware. He originally joined them in 2004 as a game designer for the Armored Core series, and soon became internationally known for directing the Souls series, starting with Demon’s Souls in 2009. Other well known games he has worked on include Bloodborne and Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice.

After graduating from Keio University with a degree in social science, Miyazaki went to work doing account managing for the US based Oracle Corporation. Upon a friend’s recommendation, Miyazaki began playing the 2001 video game Ico, causing him to consider a career change to a game designer. At age 29 however, Miyazaki found that few game companies would employ him, with one of the few being FromSoftware, where Miyazaki began working as a game planner on Armored Core: Last Raven in 2004, joining the game’s development halfway through. Miyazaki later directed Armored Core 4 and its direct sequel, Armored Core: For Answer.