Ikumi Nakamura is an unusual Japanese game designer who became famous due to the presentation of Ghostwire Tokyo at E3 2019. Tango Gameworks Creative Director Ikumi Nakamura’s speech was undoubtedly the highlight of Bethesda’s E3 2019 conference.
Thanks to her laid-back attitude and a few charming jokes, GhostWire Tokyo’s head of development turned into a real star of the Internet in just a few hours. Netizens immediately began to draw fan art in various styles, and Nakamura herself began to repost the best works.
After this speech, she left Tango Gameworks and founded her own studio Unseen, but it turns out that the lady is interested in not only games and industry. If you are interested in games and gambling you can test your luck by joining the PlayAmo login.
The First Projects
Nakamura’s first project in the gaming industry was 2004’s Okami, a non-horror action-adventure game by Hideki Kamiya, creator of Devil May Cry.
At that time, the artist was engaged in backgrounds, and little is known about this period of Nakamura’s work, but her talent, apparently, was noticed by the management. The artist had a hand in Marvel vs Capcom 3, Street Fighter X Tekken, Street Fighter V, and Nakamura worked on Bayonetta as a concept artist.
Since 2009, she has been exploring various urban places and abandoned places and leaving photos on a unique site under the pseudonym TommyBoy. On it, you can appreciate a lot of strange and slightly creepy places.
New Studio
Ikumi Nakamura introduced her new studio, Unseen, in a special trailer and talked about it in an exclusive interview with IGN. Nakamura announced her plans to establish her own studio back in March 2021, but it has only just come to the official announcement. Unseen is based in Tokyo but will be recruiting from different countries.
Nakamura does not limit himself to video games alone. She also noted that she wants to create a new intellectual property that will work as a spectrum of entertainment. For example, anime, education, and clothing. As for the debut development, Nakamura previously admitted that she wants to make a “full of dark jokes” not too serious game that will give gamers something new.
The production of the project in one form or another has already started, and the team pays a lot of attention to the setting and characters. The latter, according to Nakamura’s idea, should reflect real people and minorities.
During her nine years at Tango Gameworks, Nakamura managed to work on The Evil Within, its sequel, and the aforementioned Ghostwire: Tokyo. Creepy monsters from the games of Shinji Mikami became her calling card – probably thanks to these merits, she got the opportunity to make her own game.
The artist’s love for horror has manifested itself since childhood. She loved to watch zombie movies, but what really impressed her was Hellraiser, which the young Nakamura, by her own admission, reviewed almost every day. It is not difficult to guess that this passion influenced her further work.
Her Book
She visited the hotel in Alaska which wasn’t working at all. This became known from a tweet from Read-Only Memory. It announced the release of a book with photographs of Nakamura from various locations around the world. It will be called Project UrbEx, and the locations cover the whole world: Croatia, Germany, the USA, and many other countries.
The book will contain not only photographs of Nakamura, but drawings and descriptions of various locations. They will be divided by themes and different time periods of the girl’s travels.
The book’s website states that Ikumi was inspired by the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. series when she began her travels. The publication of the book can be helped: for 40 pounds you will receive a copy and your name on the pages. The release date remains unknown. The book will have 256 pages.
