If there’s anybody in the game industry who knows good things come to those who wait, it’s Hideki Kamiya. The director of games like Resident Evil 2 and co-founder of PlatinumGames had to wait nearly two decades to announce an Okami sequel. While work on Okami 2 is well underway, Kamiya is still waiting for another project of his to come to fruition: Scalebound.
Scalebound was first revealed during Microsoft’s 2014 E3 press conference as a new Xbox-exclusive title from PlatinumGames, directed by Kamiya. In the years following the announcement, details about the massive action game that let you control a soldier with a dragon companion were intermittently revealed. After being delayed once, Microsoft eventually canceled Scalebound entirely in 2017. Following the cancellation, Kamiya wrote in an X post, “I’ll work hard to never have to let you down like this again.”
Even almost a decade after its cancellation, however, Kamiya still has hope. When asked by Video Games Chronicle if he had reached out to new Xbox CEO Asha Sharma about Scalebound, he responded, “Well, no, but now’s my opportunity to once again say that if they want to do it, let’s make it happen!” Kamiya added that Clovers CEO and former PlatinumGames coworker Kento Koyama is also on board to return.
Kamiya further shared that he had recently met up with a number of former Scalebound staff for dinner. While they didn’t spend the entire time talking about the canceled project, it did come up. “We all remembered how fun it was to work on Scalebound,” said Kamiya, “Obviously, there were some tough times as well, but that fact that people still look back on that time with a lot of fun is something that I find very gratifying as the director of the project.”
Even if it doesn’t happen anytime soon, Kamiya is willing to wait as long as it takes. “I strongly believe that if you want something strongly enough, you eventually find a way to make it happen,” he asserted, “That’s the case with Okami right now, where even after all these years, the opportunity once again presented itself, and I hope that will be the case with Scalebound in the future as well.”
