// PC GAMER — GAMING
Legendary former Tekken boss says people don't 'properly evaluate' Hidetaka Miyazaki's 'remarkable' FromSoft career
Harada says the Souls series "was the result of everything Miyazaki and his team had built up through their previous titles."
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FromSoftware president and game director Hidetaka Miyazaki is one of the most revered names in today's games industry. Even figures like legendary former Tekken boss Katsuhiro Harada hold him in high esteem: Recently asked on X about his opinion of Miyazaki, Harada said the Dark Souls creator is a "rather unique, yet extremely serious game developer."
But while he called Miyazaki's career "remarkable," Harada said it's one that isn't fully appreciated by those touting FromSoft's achievements, because more attention is paid to the breakout sales successes of the Souls games than the gradual growth of the developers that made it possible.
What makes Miyazaki's career "so unique," Harada said, is that the FromSoft director was a relative latecomer to game development. After working as an Oracle account manager, Miyazaki made an abrupt decision to pursue a game dev career at age 29 after becoming enraptured with Ico on a friend's suggestion. Given his lack of industry experience, few companies were willing to consider his application—but FromSoft did.
"It's remarkable that someone who wasn't even a game developer during the dawn of the polygon era eventually became one of Japan's most representative game creators," Harada said. "In other words, compared to the rest of us from the same generation—including myself—his career path is exceptionally unusual. Most notably, unlike many of us, he was not working at one of the major development studios that held a significant technological advantage during the early polygon era."
First working as a designer on Armored Core: Last Raven, Miyazaki would later shift into a director role on Armored Core 4 and For Answer—and eventually, Demon's Souls and Dark Souls. While Dark Souls' ascendance as a global phenomenon might have seemed like it emerged out of nowhere, Harada said his tenure as Bandai Namco producer and marketing general manager—a tenure that overlapped with the Souls series and Elden Ring development—allowed him to appreciate how FromSoft had honed its craft as a studio.
From my perspective, Miyazaki is a rather unique, yet extremely serious game developer.His career did not begin in the game industry. In fact, he didn’t become a game developer until he was almost thirty years old.Even among developers of my generation (those of us born in… https://t.co/YjgDysT9u1July 5, 2026
"From that perspective, I can say that Dark Souls didn't suddenly become a massive success overnight," Harada said. "It was the result of everything Miyazaki and his team had built up through their previous titles."
According to Harada, the acclaim that FromSoft enjoys feels like "almost complete reversals in attitude" compared to "the days when [Miyazaki] and his team were struggling the most." It was a contributing factor to his own exhaustion with people who he says can only judge a game's merits "by saying things like, 'That title cost X billion yen to make and sold Y million copies.'"