Stellar Blade and Goddess of Victory: NIKKE developer Shift Up announced on April 1st that it would be entering a partnership with Japanese video game studio Unbound, led by Resident Evil director and Devil May Cry producer Shinji Mikami. According to a recent press release and blog post by the Korean studio, Shift Up has fully acquired Unbound, and will be taking on the role of publishing and handling global support for its titles. To celebrate the acquisition and partnership, the company also unveiled a short documentary video on YouTube featuring Mikami and Shift Up CEO Hyung-tae Kim.
As for how this collaboration came to be, the two creators cite each other’s common goals and “shared conviction,” driven by the wish to create a large-scale, high-quality game that doesn’t compromise on its creative ambitiousness. “Seeing my own vision and ideals come into focus like this, and finding someone whose direction aligns so closely is something I’ve rarely experienced before in my career. I hope we keep building together for a long time,” Kim explained.
“The best part of Shift Up is Kim. He’s a creator too, working on-site and putting his all into making games. After speaking with him, we decided to aim for the same goals together. In other words, at Unbound, we are aiming to create a masterpiece of a game,” Mikami commented.
According to a company interview from February, Unbound has been stealthily working on a fully original title of “AAA quality and AA volume,” and is currently recruiting development staff. The company is also parallelly working on smaller, more experimental PC and console-based IPs. With Shift Up handling its publishing, all of the titles will be developed with the global market in mind.
