Director and writer on the original Resident Evil 4 Shinji Mikami has explained that the team at Capcom never designed the influential camera system to be groundbreaking.
Mikami recently spoke to fellow Resident Evil franchise veteran Jun Takeuchi about the last 25 years of the series, with the second part of the video releasing today (August 29).
In the interview video, Mikami and Takeuchi address the overwhelmingly positive response the game had from players and other developers for simply moving the camera over the protagonist’s shoulder.
Check out the video, with its text translation, below.
“It felt natural, oddly enough, we weren’t planning on doing something innovative, but in the end everyone kept saying we did,” said Mikami (via VGC).
“To us personally, we just thought that angle was better. We weren’t trying to do something new or groundbreaking, there was none of that.”
Apparently Masahiro Sakurai, the long-time director of the Super Smash Bros. franchise, was the first person to praise the camera, Mikami recalls. In fact, Takeuchi says the Gears Of War team directly told him at E3 that they had based that game’s camera off of Resident Evil 4 as well. The first Gears Of War released in 2006, with Resident Evil 4 coming out in 2005.
