On December 3, 2020, a short announcement went out in Tokyo. A new company called Bokeh Game Studio had been founded, it said, on August 13 of that year. The head of the company was Keiichiro Toyama. The announcement gave no title for the first game and no release date. It did say what the name meant. 'Bokeh' is the photographer's word for the soft blur of light behind a sharp subject, and the company chose it to suggest creative work from Japan reaching people around the world, each seeing it in their own way.
Toyama was fifty years old or close to it. He had been born in 1970 in Miyazaki Prefecture, studied art at Tokyo Zokei University, and joined Konami in 1994 as a graphic artist. In 1999 he directed Silent Hill, and wrote its scenario and designed its backgrounds as well. He was in his late twenties. Soon after the game came out he left Konami for Sony, where he stayed until 2020.
At Sony he made games that did not look much like each other. Siren came out in 2003, a horror game in which you survive by watching through other people's eyes. Its sequel followed in 2006, and Siren: Blood Curse in 2008. Then, in 2012, came Gravity Rush on the PlayStation Vita, in which the hero falls upward through a floating city. A sequel was released in Japan on January 19, 2017. By then the man known for fog and rust was also the man who had made a game about flying.
In September 2020 he left Sony Interactive Entertainment. Two colleagues had signed on: Kazunobu Sato as president and producer, and Junya Okura as chief technology officer and game director. In the announcement, Toyama said his wish had not changed since the day he entered the industry. He wanted to make games from original ideas and have people enjoy them. And he wrote that, to keep doing that while the industry changed so fast around him, he had come to feel that he himself needed a big change. That was the decision to go independent.
He was not unclear about what kind of change he meant. In a later interview he told VGC that at Sony there was a growing push toward games with bigger budgets. About his own new studio he said: 'I feel I can do this without a massive budget.' The size of the game was not the point for him. In the same conversation he said, 'My motive was always to create original games.'
The timing cut close. Sony's Japan Studio, the department where he had spent most of his career, was closed in April 2021 after nearly thirty years. Some of its former staff went to other teams at Sony. Others followed Toyama to Bokeh. His reasons for leaving, as he gave them, were about what he wanted to make, and nothing he said addressed the closure itself.
In an early video interview he said what the first game would be. It would be dark, a return to the horror he had been away from for some time. But, he said, not the grinding kind. He wanted a work of entertainment that kept the taste of horror and also had some exhilaration in it. That was Slitterhead, revealed at The Game Awards on December 9, 2021. Akira Yamaoka, who had written the music for the first Silent Hill, composed the score again.
Slitterhead was released on November 8, 2024, for PlayStation, Windows and Xbox. The reviews were mixed. Its Metacritic scores were in the low to high sixties, depending on the platform, while the four critics at Famitsu gave it 34 out of 40. It was not the quiet success that anyone could have drawn up in advance. It was a game made by a small studio, directed by a man who had been making games for thirty years, and it looked like nothing else released that year.
Look again at the name he chose. Bokeh is what remains when you point a lens at one thing and let everything else go soft. Twenty-six years after he first walked into Konami, Toyama had a small studio, a small team, and one thing in focus. What is the one thing you would keep sharp, if you were allowed to let the rest blur?