Tango Gameworks founder Shinji Mikami is best known as the grandfather of the survival horror genre, thanks to his work on Resident Evil. That experience also formed the basis of Tango, which launched The Evil Within as its first game and followed it up with a sequel a few years later.
The company is now on the verge of launching something different. Ghostwire: Tokyo isn’t a survival horror game at all – it’s an action title for PS5. Action games have to feel good, and so Tango worked closely with Sony to ensure every trigger squeeze felt as satisfying as possible.
Producer Masato Kimura remembers Mikami’s first impressions of the DualSense, PS5’s controller with built-in haptic feedback and adaptive triggers. “This feels too weak,” he said of an early prototype, according to Kimura. After testing it out, Mikami told Kimura that he was going for a walk. What he actually meant was he was going to Sony to give “some pretty strong feedback about the controller”.
“Mikami-san is quite verbal in the way he expresses things,” Kimura told GLHF. “The folks at Sony were probably taken aback and a little frightened by the power of Mikami-san’s vocal-ness. Afterward, when we received a closer-to-final prototype of the controller, Mikami-san was very happy with how his feedback was used within Sony to improve the controller. It was very impressive that they were able to take our feedback seriously and actually make improvements.”
You can read our full Ghostwire: Tokyo interview with Masato Kimura and game director Kenji Kimura at that link. The game lands on PS5 on March 25.
Written by Kirk McKeand on behalf of GLHF.