“We’re all working within the same sandbox, in a way.”
It’s not an understatement to say that FromSoftware changed the gaming industry with Demon’s Souls in 2009 and, later, Dark Souls in 2011—proving that challenging, punishing games can absolutely find mainstream success.
So much success, in fact, that it soon spawned a flood of flattering imitators—and so received the honour of creating a genre named after itself: The soulslike. It’s a name so pervasive that any soulslike review will, invariably, still use FromSoftware’s games as a measuring stick, which is sometimes unfair, but pretty much unavoidable.
Yet even in the wake of Elden Ring’s DLC victory lap, Shadow of the Erdtree, FromSoftware president Hidetaka Miyazaki is still very much humble about the honour of producing an entire genre named after his work, as per a recent interview with Rolling Stone.
As the interview states, Miyazaki doesn’t quite consider FromSoftware to be solely responsible for the genre itself: “We just happened to release it into the market at the right time … So as happy as it makes us, I think it’s also very humbling to know that there has been a lot of credit given to us for naming a genre.
