Best known as the creator of the Silent Hill, Siren, and Gravity Rush franchises, Keiichiro Toyama is a Japanese videogame director and designer who started his career in 1994 at Konami as a Graphic Designer, with the Hideo Kojima designed Snatcher being one of his very first projects. Afterwards, and whilst still at Konami, he was instrumental in creating the Silent Hill franchise, before leaving to join Sony, whereupon he created the Siren and Gravity Rush franchises. Since then, he has gone independent with his own indie game development studio - Bokeh Game Studio - and is looking to release Bokeh's first game (Slitterhead) on 8 November 2024.
In a career spanning interview, I spoke to Keiichiro Toyama about his 30 year time within the industry, what his thoughts are in making the transition from working for a AAA publisher to essentially becoming an independent, whether he'd be open to working on new iterations of the franchises that he's renowned for, whether he'd be open to collaborating with any of the horror greats in the games industry, and what his long-term goals are for the next 30 years... Enjoy!
Mr Toyama-san... You're the principal creator of Silent Hill and Siren, but then you also did the Gravity Rush games which...