At The Game Awards last week, it was revealed that Hideki Kamiya is now working on a sequel to Okami at the newly-founded CLOVERS. But why did the game creator decide to leave PlatinumGames back in 2023 and spend a year unemployed? In a recent interview on Denfaminicogamer, Kamiya sheds light on his circumstances at the time.

On September 26, 2023, the creator of Bayonetta and Viewtiful Joe Hideki Kamiya publicly announced that he would be leaving PlatinumGames on October 12 of that year. However, Kamiya reveals that this decision had already been reached within the company around mid-July. “At the time, there was a mismatch between my way of thinking in terms of creativity and the company’s new policy, so CEO (Atsushi) Inaba and I had been negotiating for over 3 months, but we just couldn’t reach an agreement.” Kamiya explains.

Apparently, former Clover Studios’ head Inaba and Kamiya had many long, calm discussions about the matter before realizing that they were unable to come up with a solution that was agreeable to both of them. Therefore, Kamiya eventually decided to leave PlatinumGames. “I felt like my creativity would die if I continued to work there,” Kamiya sums up, making sure to emphasize that there is no bad blood between him and Inaba.

The Okami and Viewtiful Joe creator did not leave PlatinumGames with the intention of founding a new company. “I didn’t think at all about what would happen after that. It wasn’t like I quit because I had something I wanted to do, or that I had been offered a new job,” Kamiya reveals.

Talking with freelance game designer Kenta Koyama, who had been working with him on the unreleased third Viewtiful Joe game (titled Project G.G), Kamiya said “I told Koyama that I would continue making games if there was a studio that would accept me. If there wasn’t, I would go back to my parents’ house. Komiya then said to me, ‘Kamiya-san, if that’s the case, why don’t we work together?’ But I didn’t take it seriously at the time.” Before Kamiya left PlatinumGames, other staff came up to him to say that they had joined the company because of him, “which surprised me as I thought they just viewed me as a grumpy old guy who causes problems,” Kamiya quips.

After leaving, Kamiya considered asking another game company to take him in and even contemplated going freelance “like Yoko Taro” of NieR series fame. However, “It occurred to me that rather than working on my own, I needed to create a place where I could make games with people like those who reached out to me when I left PlatinumGames,” Kamiya comments.

Why was Hideki Kamiya unemployed for one year?

At this point, Kamiya sought the help of Koyama to establish CLOVERS. However, for a year after Kamiya’s departure from PlatinumGames, he prominently referred to himself as jobless- with even his Twitter handle being “Unemployed Hideki Kamiya.” The reason for this was the one-year non-competition clause that Kamiya had to abide by upon leaving PlatinumGames. Remaining completely unemployed for exactly one year, it wasn’t until October 13, 2024 that Kamiya could join CLOVERS and play an active role in the new company.

Now, the new company is hard at work on a sequel to Kamiya’s cult classic PS2 game Okami, which is a joint development project between M2, which employs many of the first game’s production staff, and Machine Head Works. With Kamiya back at a company where he can fully unleash his creativity, hopefully the Okami sequel will be a tour-de-force.