One of Bethesda’s (now defunct) studios was never the same after the departure of Shinji Mikami, but that wasn’t the end of the story.
The last game released by Tango Gameworks, the studio of ZeniMax Media under Microsoft, was Hi-Fi Rush, one of the pleasant surprises of 2023. Although it was absolutely not in the same style as The Evil Within (it was a rhythm-based action game with cel-shaded visuals instead of survival horror), it was well received by the public and the press, so it’s no wonder that the Xbox exclusivity ended for it, as a PlayStation 5 port of the game was released in March (and there were rumors of a Nintendo Switch version, but that might not come out…).
On Twitter, Timur222 shared a LinkedIn resume of one of their former programmers. It says that Tsuyoshi Okugawa was the lead programmer for an announced game between 2023 and 2024, and the graphics programmer for an unannounced project in 2024. It is unclear if these are two separate games, but it is possible that he was assigned to a different position at Tango Gameworks and that it was just one unannounced game. And there’s no point in deleting that section of his resume, because the Internet never forgets.
Tango Gameworks was working on a sequel to Ghostwire Tokyo, as we learned from documents leaked in the Microsoft/FTC case. This game was scheduled for release sometime in 2024, presumably for the Xbox line and PC. It may or may not have been the unannounced game, and so two projects may have been in development before Microsoft shut down the team along with Arkane Austin (they disappointed with Redfall last year, and the game’s last update will include an offline mode).
It’s a shame that the studio left in such an ugly way, because they just proved that a small project can be successful.
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