Located in an old warehouse in Tsukishima, a working-class neighborhood of Tokyo, Unseen Inc makes for quite the contrast to the corporate offices where Ikumi Nakamura started her career. She joined Capcom in 2004 as an environment artist, before following two of the publisher's brightest creative minds to their own video game studios: first Hideki Kamiya’s PlatinumGames, then Shinji Mikami's Tango Gameworks. It was at the latter company that she first caught the public’s attention, after taking to Bethesda's E3 conference stage in 2019 to announce Ghostwire: Tokyo. However, she left the project and Tango later that year, due in part to health problems.
Taking the opportunity to form her own game company, Nakamura's aim – as she first told us in Edge issue 371 – was to create a 'borderless' studio. In part, that refers to Unseen's hybrid mode of working. "Before [the pandemic], I had already been thinking for several years about the possibility of making video games remotely as a studio," Nakamura tells us, "where team members didn’t have to come to Japan." Accordingly, it also means a multicultural studio, with 90 per cent of its employees coming from overseas, leveraging AI "to help translate and streamline communication" between Japanese and English speakers.
