Resident Evil director Shinji Mikami has founded a new studio, Unbound, after leaving The Evil Within creators Tango Gameworks in 2023. The studio has been lurking in the open for a while – it started business back in May 2023 – and exists to create “high-end”, “original AAA” games, or at least, “AA” games that are trying very hard to look all big and blockblustery.

Mikami isn’t the only auld Capcom and Resident Evil sage aboard the good ship Unbound. He’s joined by Masato Kimura, who worked at Tango as producer on Ghostwire: Tokyo and Hi-Fi Rush. Mikami appears to have founded Unbound shortly after he left Tango, and there are currently about 50 people on the books. As passed along by VGC, other staff at Unbound have apparently worked on Silent Hill and Shadow Of The Colossus.

Microsoft announced plans to close Mikami’s old joint Tango in 2024 amid a swathe of cutbacks, though the studio survives in the hands of Subnautica 2 publishers Krafton. Mikami expressed shock at the time of Tango’s Microshanking. “I had thought the studio would be safe as long as they continued to make Hi-Fi Rush games,” he told Ian Games. “That’s one of the reasons I left.”

There’s an older PR interview with Kimura over on Unbound’s site, in which he broadly observes that Unbound don’t have hundreds of billions of yen and hundreds of people, so will be aiming to create “AA” games with Aspirations toward a third A. There’s also mention of an experimentation-driven, learn-by-breaking-stuff production style, which I’m sure won’t give any non-Ideas People headaches.