Located in an old warehouse in Tsukishima, a working-class neighbourhood of Tokyo, Unseen Inc makes for quite the contrast to the corporate offices where Ikumi Nakamura started her career. She joined Capcom in 2004 as an environment artist, before following two of the publisher’s brightest creative minds to their own videogame studios: first Hideki Kamiya’s PlatinumGames, then Shinji Mikami’s Tango Gameworks.
It was at the latter company that she first caught the public’s attention, after taking to Bethesda’s E3 conference stage in 2019 to announce Ghostwire: Tokyo. However, she left the project and Tango later that year, due in part to health problems. Taking the opportunity to form her own game company, Nakamura’s aim – as she first told us in E371 – was to create a ‘borderless’ studio.
In part, that refers to Unseen’s hybrid mode of working. “Before [the pandemic], I had already been thinking for several years about the possibility of making videogames remotely as a studio,” Nakamura tells us, “where team members didn’t have to come to Japan.” Accordingly, it also means a multicultural studio, with 90 per cent of its employees coming from overseas, leveraging AI “to help translate and streamline communication” between Japanese and English speakers.
While we can’t help but notice the bonsai tree and traditional paper lantern decorating its entrance, Unseen is not what Nakamura would call a Japanese company – certainly not in terms of the strict corporate hierarchy for which they are typically renowned. Indeed, to illustrate this, she casually calls two overseas staff members over to our meeting for their input. “[Unseen] is obviously not very corporate at all – we just try to be mutually respectful while also trying to make a good game,” one team member says. Their colleague, having worked at a major Japanese publisher previously, is more to the point: “We’re treated
