At a young age, he was already a fan of video games thanks to a neighbor who often invited him to play with his Epoch Cassette Vision console.
[2] In high school, Kamiya bought a NEC PC-8801 to study programming, but ended up playing video games every day.
[5] Other favorite games include Space Harrier, Cybernator, Punch-Out, Wonder Boy in Monster Land, Snatcher, Sorcerian, and Star Cruiser.
[8][9] The game was directed by Kamiya, who led the team, which was composed of newer Capcom employees and over half of the staff from the original Resident Evil.
[8][10][11] In the initial stages of development, producer Shinji Mikami often had creative disagreements with Kamiya, and tried to influence the team with his own direction.
[11] To fulfill Capcom's sales plan of two million copies, director Kamiya tried to attract new customers with a more ostentatious and Hollywood-like story presentation.
[12] As Yoshiki Okamoto did not want to simply enforce the new direction, he had regular series writer Noboru Sugimura discuss the plot revisions with Mikami and the development staff.
[14] Initially developed for the PlayStation 2, the game was directed by Hideki Kamiya after producer Shinji Mikami requested that he create a new entry in the Resident Evil series.
[15] Around the turn of the millennium,[16] Sugimura[17] created a scenario for the title, based on Kamiya's idea to make a very cool and stylized action game.
[18] The story was based on unraveling the mystery surrounding the body of protagonist Tony,[19] an invincible man with skills and an intellect exceeding that of normal people, his superhuman abilities explained with biotechnology.
[16] As Kamiya felt the playable character did not look brave and heroic enough in battles from a fixed angle, he decided to drop the prerendered backgrounds from previous Resident Evil installments and instead opted for a dynamic camera system.
[15] This new direction required the team to make a trip to Europe where they spent eleven days in the United Kingdom and Spain photographing things like Gothic statues, bricks, and stone pavements for use in textures.
[16] The cast of characters remained largely identical to that in Sugimura's scenario,[23] although appearances of the hero's mother and father were written out of the story.
During a test-play, Kamiya discovered that enemies could be kept in the air by slashing them repeatedly, which led to the inclusion of juggles by gunfire and sword strikes in Devil May Cry.
[36] Although Kamiya did not direct the third game, Devil May Cry 3: Dante's Awakening, he still advised writer Bingo Morihashi in the characterization of the title character as well as his design.
[37] Kamiya stated on Twitter that he was interested in remaking the original Devil May Cry game, although he was not employed by Capcom at the time.
[42] Kamiya eventually created a minute-long demonstration movie showing a wolf running about a forest, with flowers blossoming in its wake, but still lacked any gameplay.
Kamiya has stated he is interested in making a new Star Fox game, and due to a lot of fans asking him on Twitter repeatedly, he was encouraged to submit ideas to Nintendo without success.
Koyama left PlatinumGames in July to establish Clovers, acting as president and CEO, with Kamiya joining after his own departure.