former GhostWire: Tokyo Creative Director Ikumi Nakamura has officially opened her new studio named Unseen.
Nakamura who made a big splash at E3 2019 with her enigmatic and heartfelt approach and has worked on it before Okami and bayonetShe left Tango Gameworks out of concern for her health. “You can’t make games if you’re not healthy,” Nakamura said in March 2021. “I started to wonder if there wasn’t an opportunity for me to make games while I felt better.” After leaving Tango Gameworks, she received a flood of job offers. She has visited game studios around the world to see how different companies make games and used that experience to start her own company, Unseen.
“I decided that instead of a company that makes games, I’d rather have a studio where artists can come together and have fun making games together and be creative,” says Nakamura IGN in a recent interview.
Nakamura wants the studio to be a diverse, cross-cultural collaborator with developers from Japan and around the world. “A mix of cultures can be a breeding ground for new ideas, and that’s the real joy of starting a new studio,” says Nakamura. This diversity will hopefully be reflected in the studio’s games. “I want to create a game with characters that reflect real-life personalities and minorities, with an open-minded environment that represents multiple cultures,” says Nakamura.
Expect Unseen to tackle a mix of projects as well. “I don’t want to just think about video games,” says Nakamura. “I want to create new intellectual property rights that can function as entertainment diversity. For example anime, education and apparel. I would like to make a game that can also influence this kind of media.”
But don’t expect Nakamura to give up her beloved influences. “I like crime, horror, zombies, the supernatural and sci-fi,” she says. “I find these genres fascinating and I’m good at them, so I want to keep working on games that relate to these themes.”
