Silent Hill and Gravity Rush creator leaves Sony and founds Bokeh Game Studio

This article contains affiliate links: if you buy through them, SavePoint may earn a commission at no extra cost to you. It doesn’t change what we write.

Anyone who lived through the original PlayStation era remembers the fright of Silent Hill’s fog. The man behind that nightmare, Keiichiro Toyama, announced in early December 2020 that he had left Sony to open his own studio: Bokeh Game Studio, founded alongside Junya Okura and Kazunobu Sato, longtime colleagues at Japan Studio.

Toyama’s career is the stuff of video rental store shelves. A graduate in arts from Tokyo Zokei University, he joined Konami in 1994 as a graphic artist, worked on Snatcher for the Sega CD and then created Silent Hill, released in 1999. He left Konami soon after the first game and went to Sony’s Japan Studio, where he directed Siren (2003), Forbidden Siren 2 (2006) and Siren: Blood Curse (2008). In 2012, he released Gravity Rush on the PS Vita, which got a sequel in 2017 on the PS4. Okura and Sato had also worked on the Siren series.

According to Toyama’s profile, Bokeh was officially created on August 13, 2020, and he left Japan Studio in September. Explaining the decision, he said he was inspired by designer Fumito Ueda, who had described the experience of founding his own studio, genDESIGN. The news came at a time when there was a lot of talk about Sony prioritizing the Western market and gradually moving away from Japanese studios. Bokeh’s first project was announced as an action-adventure game, with no date yet.

What came next

Toyama said he would return to horror, with inspiration from filmmakers Wong Kar-wai and Fruit Chan. The game, Slitterhead, was revealed at The Game Awards 2021 and launched on November 8, 2024 for PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, PC and Xbox Series X|S. Set in a city inspired by the old Kowloon Walled City in the 1990s, it mixes ideas from Gravity Rush and Siren and received mixed reviews.