A novel’s achievements can elude a careless reader. A film’s themes, or its plot, can be misconstrued by a lazy viewer. Only a video game, however, can punish an audience’s faults. If a player mistimes a jump, falls to an adversary, or fails to reach the end of a level, a game can deny them access to the rest of the work, halting progress until they pass the test or resign in defeat.
The video-game director Hidetaka Miyazaki, who’s in his late forties, has punished more players than perhaps anyone else. In Dark Souls, the 2011 fantasy game that made him famous, you play as a loin-clothed wretch, racing through sewers and cowering in forests. You’re attacked by a giant wolf, pugilist mushrooms, mephitic swamps, and a sword-wielding spider. If you fail to parry an aggressor’s lunge, or tumble off a rampart, you’re greeted by a superfluous message: “You Died.” After it fades, you’re reincarnated beside a bonfire, one of a series of checkpoints scattered throughout this mysterious, vaguely medieval world. Every one of your enemies has re-spawned, too.
The average player will return to the firelight hundreds of times. Games often flatter their players with childish power fantasies, but Miyazaki’s work relies on the virtues of failure, patience, and hard-earned precision. You cannot mash the buttons and force your way to triumph. Each foe has heft and intelligence; their attack patterns must be carefully observed and countered, your stamina managed. A duel with a knight must be approached differently from a brawl with a pack of wolves, or a skirmish on horseback with a soaring dragon. A moment’s lapse in concentration, in even the simplest encounter, can prove fatal. As in life, struggle is infused with truth and consequence.
Dark Souls and its sequels have become notorious for their ego-skewering difficulty. Their reputation transcends video games: “The Dark Souls of ‘X’ ’’ is a meme used to describe any particularly onerous task. (A teetering pile of dirty plates? “The Dark Souls of washing up.”) “I’ve never been a very skilled player,” Miyazaki told me recently, via Zoom. He was sitting in his office, a book-lined room in the Shinjuku ward of Tokyo. “I die a lot. So, in my work, I want to answer the question: If death is to be more than a mark of failure, how do I give it meaning? How do I make death enjoyable?”
Miyazaki is a private man; he rarely gives interviews, and he rescheduled our meeting three times. But his approach has proved wildly popular. Last year, at the Golden Joysticks, the longest-running video-game awards show, members of the public voted Dark Souls the greatest game of all time, over classics such as Tetris, Doom, and Super Mario 64. Miyazaki’s games have sold close to thirty million copies, and his latest, Elden Ring, which will be released Friday, is one of the most awaited titles of the year.
Still, for every vanquisher of Miyazaki’s monsters, there’s another who glumly sets down the controller. “I do feel apologetic toward anyone who feels there’s just too much to overcome in my games,” Miyazaki told me. He held his head in his hands, then smiled. “I just want as many players as possible to experience the joy that comes from overcoming hardship.”
Miyazaki grew up poor in Shizuoka, a hundred miles southwest of Tokyo. As a child, he couldn’t afford books of his own; at the library, he borrowed English fantasy and science fiction that he didn’t understand, imagining stories that might accompany the pictures. He went on to study at Keio University, idly pursuing a degree in social science, then joined Oracle, the American I.T. company. He took the job, he told me, only so that he could pay for his younger sister to go to college.
Miyazaki had played games in his youth, but the moment of discovery arrived around 2001, when, at the urging of friends, he tried Fumito Ueda’s Ico, an exquisitely minimalist fairy tale about a boy, a girl, and their escape from a castle. For Miyazaki, the game reproduced the childhood joy of piecing together a story from snippets of text and mysterious illustrations. He decided to switch careers. At twenty-nine, and with no relevant experience, he took a significant pay cut to join FromSoftware, an obscure studio based in Tokyo. He started as a coder, then took over development of a struggling project—a fantasy set in a shadow world of looming castles and eldritch monsters. He rewrote the game from the cobblestones up, creating a mechanism by which, if a player died, they returned to the level’s beginning, with their health weakened, their resources lost, and their enemies just as strong. “If my ideas failed, nobody would care,” he told me. “It was already a failure.”
Demon’s Souls was released in 2009, without fanfare. The game’s ponderous, precise combat was poorly suited to demos; Miyazaki recalls players shrugging and walking away. The cover showed an Arthurian knight slumped against a wall—an image that suggested struggle and defeat, not heroism—and the game’s narrative was built from wispy clues: descriptions of found objects, a dying foe’s soliloquy. In time, though, the game’s ambiguity, Gothic design, and intense stakes earned it a word-of-mouth following. In 2011, its spiritual sequel, Dark Souls, became a sensation, selling nearly two and a half million copies in eighteen months. It also launched FromSoftware into the top tier of Japanese studios. Three years later, Miyazaki was appointed the company’s president.
A theory suggests itself: the challenging circumstances of Miyazaki’s early life, followed by a string of hard-won achievements, provided the template for the emotional trajectory that many players experience in his games. Miyazaki—whose face, behind his glasses and wispy goatee, is youthful and jocular—resists the idea. “I wouldn’t say that my life story, to put it in grandiose terms, has affected the way I make games,” he said. “A more accurate way to look at it is problem solving. We all face problems in our daily lives. Finding answers is always a satisfying thing. But in life, you know, there’s not a lot that gives us those feelings readily.”
The question of how hard games should be is closely tied to the question of whom games are for. Some argue that they should be accessible: gently guided experiences that adapt to different skills, interests, and physical capabilities. Others say that they should operate on their own terms. In this model, difficulty is the creator’s prerogative; not every game has to be for everyone.
Miyazaki’s work is often invoked by the latter camp, as it suggests that challenge, not escapism or uplift, is the medium’s crucial quality. “It’s an interesting question,” Miyazaki told me. “We are always looking to improve, but, in our games specifically, hardship is what gives meaning to the experience. So it’s not something we’re willing to abandon at the moment. It’s our identity.”
And yet Elden Ring, Miyazaki’s new game, offers something of a compromise, a way “for people to feel like victory is an attainable feat,” he said. All of his hallmarks remain—the dramatic encounters with giant foes, the demanding combat, the insistence that the player improve their own abilities, rather than merely power up their onscreen avatar—but there are concessions that make the game more approachable. Now you can summon spectral animals to your side, or ride your horse to flee a losing fight. In Miyazaki’s previous games, a player was consigned to a handful of given paths, each one blocked by a powerful boss. In Elden Ring, the world is truly open. If one path proves too challenging, you can simply pick another.
Still, you die a lot: in the white heat of a dragon’s snort, under the cold weight of a giant’s hammer, whipped by the leg of a beached octopus. For Miyazaki, video-game death is an opportunity to create a memory, or a punch line. “When I’m playing these games, I think, This is the way I’d want to die—in a way that is amusing or interesting, or that creates a story I can share,” he said. “Death and rebirth, trying and overcoming—we want that cycle to be enjoyable. In life, death is a horrible thing. In play, it can be something else.”
For Elden Ring, Miyazaki collaborated with one of his heroes, George R. R. Martin—whose work, he told me, he enjoyed long before fantasy novels such as “Game of Thrones,” when Martin was best known as a science-fiction writer. Miyazaki approached Martin at the urging of one of FromSoftware’s board members, and was surprised to learn that Martin was a fan of his games. At first, Miyazaki feared that the language barrier and age gap—Martin is seventy-three—would make connection difficult. But as their conversations progressed, in hotel suites or in Martin’s home town, a friendship bloomed.
Miyazaki placed some key restraints on Martin’s contributions. Namely, Martin was to write the game’s backstory, not its actual script. Elden Ring takes place in a world known as the Lands Between. Martin provided snatches of text about its setting, its characters, and its mythology, which includes the destruction of the titular ring and the dispersal of its shards, known as the Great Runes. Miyazaki could then explore the repercussions of that history in the story that the player experiences directly. “In our games, the story must always serve the player experience,” he said. “If [Martin] had written the game’s story, I would have worried that we might have to drift from that. I wanted him to be able to write freely and not to feel restrained by some obscure mechanic that might have to change in development.”
There’s an irony in Martin—an author known for his intricate, clockwork plots—working with Miyazaki, whose games are defined by their narrative obfuscation. In Dark Souls, a crucial plot detail is more likely to be found in the description of an item in your inventory than in dialogue. It’s a technique Miyazaki employs to spark players’ imaginations, in the same way that he extracted stories from illustrated fantasy books as a child. “That power of imagination is important to me,” he said. “Offering room for user interpretation creates a sense of communication with the audience—and, of course, communication between users in the community. This is something that I enjoy seeing unfold with our games, and that has continued to influence my work.”
I first met Miyazaki in Tokyo, in 2011, several months before Dark Souls’ release. He was working in an open-plan area with his team, and a digital photo frame stood on his desk, nestled between a battalion of plastic figurines defending unopened whiskey bottles. The screen cycled through quotations, each a criticism made by the game’s testers during development—a challenge to the group to heighten their efforts. In the months leading up to a release, Miyazaki leaves the office only sporadically, to shower. At work, too, he believes that struggle amplifies accomplishment.
By his own admission, Miyazaki is a micromanager. He calls his method “total direction,” and he can provide input on anything from the style of a costume’s buttons to the precise angle of a plunging hillside. “I’ve learned so many things from Miyazaki,” Masanori Waragai, a concept artist, told me, in 2015. “Too many to mention.” Miyazaki has opinions on fonts, on menu layouts. He’s even performed movements for animators, acting out sequences that are mimed by a game’s characters.
It’s unusual for such a figure to be company director: the demands of running a business can easily smother creative endeavor. But Miyazaki sees himself as an outsider in the managerial class; he observes fellow-C.E.O.s like an anthropologist, joking that he sometimes uses them as inspiration for his monsters. He’s also a nurturing boss—his team routinely calls him for personal advice—and is acutely aware of the hazards of the empowered auteur. “The thing I prize is total openness from the staff; I try to be frank about my own mistakes,” he said. “Because of my influence over these games, people are often reluctant to give their honest opinion, even when it may matter most. So I try not to let pride get involved, and try to create trust.”
This mode of collaboration can be seen in Miyazaki’s games, where players are encouraged to work together, in subtle ways, to surmount the challenges they face. In Demon’s Souls, Miyazaki allowed players to leave messages, scrawled into the landscape, that appeared on strangers’ screens, providing guidance or instruction. In this way, a teen-ager in Kansas could warn an engineer in Shinjuku to watch out for a trapdoor. Pranksters could also trick players—assuring them, for instance, that rumors of a trapdoor had been greatly exaggerated.
In Elden Ring, if your game system is connected to the Internet, the ghostly outlines of other players occasionally flicker onscreen while you roam, suggesting that you share the burden of your experiences. It’s even possible to summon another player for help during a taxing encounter. The players can’t readily talk to one another, so the difficulty is leavened by trust; after the challenge is complete, the summoned player dissolves in a shower of light. Miyazaki had the idea for such moments years ago, after his car became trapped in snow on a hill. A group of strangers pushed the vehicle to the top, then disappeared soundlessly into the night.
When I first played Dark Souls, I was a young adult with young children, navigating an unprecedented level of havoc. Games functioned as a salve: little worlds where everything could be ordered and, with time and effort, set right. This was especially true of Miyazaki’s games. In a world where every force was working to expel you, the feeling of resisting, then overcoming, those forces was deeply rewarding.
I’d often wondered whether Miyazaki had a similar response, using games as a way of exerting control. “I enjoy the process of solving problems that I know can be fixed,” he told me. “Impossible challenges? That’s where I draw the line, and where I feel stressed out. So I’m extremely fortunate to be able to apply that process by creating games.”
When I asked whether his family had played his games, he laughed and pointed out that his daughter was three. “Not quite old enough,” he said. But there was another reason: Miyazaki worried that his work, behind its abstractions, contained something too personal to reveal. Total control, it seems, risked total exposure. “I don’t want to let my family play my games, because I feel like they’d see a bad part of me, something that’s almost unsavory,” he said. “I don’t know. I’d feel embarrassed. So I say: no Dark Souls in the house.”
There’s a paradox in Miyazaki’s yearning for boundaries between his work and his world. Games are composed of fictional challenges, which often seem trite and distant compared with those of daily existence. But Miyazaki’s achievement has been to narrow the gap between them. By rooting games in the human experience—in shame, in failure, and even in death—he has brought them closer to life.
