Tango Gameworks

Shinji Mikami had been with video game developer Capcom since 1989, working on several of its franchises and creating the Resident Evil series of horror video games.[1] Over time, Capcom grew too large to Mikami, who also wished to develop games based around concepts other than horror, as he had for Capcom.[1] For some time, he worked on a freelance basis, directing the action game Vanquish for PlatinumGames and producing the action-horror game Shadows of the Damned for Grasshopper Manufacture.[1] He was repeatedly inquired by Sega to develop a horror game for them, which he rejected.[1] On 1 March 2010, Mikami (at the time aged 44) and a team of twelve developers founded a new studio, Tango, in Odaiba, Tokyo, where he moved to from his previous office in Osaka.[1][2] Shigenori Nishikawa, the director of MadWorld for PlatinumGames, joined the company in May 2010.[3] Tango immediately began work on multiple projects, with one small team working for six months on a joke game that would have starred a cockroach standing on two legs and shooting a gun.[1]

Their primary project was Noah, a sci-fi open world survival-adventure game inspired by the 1984 film Dune.[1] In this game, Earth had become mostly uninhabitable and humankind moved to other planets, where one colony loses contact with the others and a research team is tasked with finding them.[1] Shortly after development on this game began, Tango ran into financial issues; according to Mikami, "something happened".[1] American video game publisher Bethesda Softworks stepped in to assist and had its parent company, ZeniMax Media, acquire the studio, which was announced on 28 October 2010.[1][4] Tango was merged into ZeniMax Asia K.K., ZeniMax's Asia-Pacific branch based in Tokyo's Aomi area, and reorganised as a division under the name "Tango Gameworks".[2][4] For the acquisition, ZeniMax used a part of the US$150 million it had previously raised in private funding.[5] Mikami agreed to the acquisition because he felt as though Bethesda and ZeniMax would provide the "most independent" development environment for Tango.[6] In November 2010, composer Masafumi Takada (formerly of Grasshopper Manufacture), as well as artist Naoki Katakai and programmer Shinichiro Ishikawa (both formerly of Capcom) joined Tango.[7] By March 2012, Tango had 65 employees, with Mikami expecting to eventually employ 100 staffers.[8]

Following the acquisition, Mikami envisioned Tango to continue developing multiple games at a time.[1] Noah was cancelled and development on a new AAA project, Zwei, commenced.[1] Initially, this game saw a man and woman chained together hunting down a vampire, with either two players controlling each character individually, or one player both simultaneously.[1] Zwei was formally announced in April 2012.[9] Over time, the game evolved into a single-player survival horror game and was rechristened The Evil Within, which was announced in April 2013.[1][10] In August 2014, Tango moved from Aomi to the Shibaura district.[2] The Evil Within was released by Bethesda in October 2014.[11] It was the last game directed by Mikami so that future Tango games could provide opportunities for other people.[1] A sequel to The Evil Within, The Evil Within 2, was announced in June 2017, during E3 2017, and released by Bethesda in October 2017.[12][13] In June 2019, during Bethesda's press conference at E3 2019, Mikami and creative director Ikumi Nakamura announced Ghostwire: Tokyo, an action-adventure game with horror elements.[14] Nakamura later resigned from Tango in September 2019, leaving the studio after nine years.[15]

On September 21, 2020, Microsoft announced that it had agreed to acquire ZeniMax for US$7.5 billion , with the deal to close by the first half of 2021.[16]

• Official website