director
Keiichiro Toyama
外山圭一郎
The scariest thing was never the monster. It was the familiar street, tilted just slightly wrong.
About
Keiichiro Toyama is a Japanese game director born in 1970 in Miyazaki Prefecture. He studied fine arts at Tokyo Zokei University and joined Konami in 1994 as a graphic artist. Within five years he was entrusted with directing Silent Hill (1999) — writing the scenario, designing the environments, and shaping the psychological horror that would define a genre. He moved to Sony Japan Studio after the game's release, where he directed Siren (2003) and Gravity Rush (2012). In 2020 he left Sony to found Bokeh Game Studio, choosing independence after nearly three decades inside large corporations.
In Keiichiro's Own Words
Real interview footage, not paraphrase. Each line links back to the exact moment in the video so you can hear it for yourself.
“I started to work in the game industry in 1994, the year the first PlayStation was released. I started as an artist, I used to make computer graphics, Soon after that, I was asked if I wanted to become a director.”
“Gravity Rush is inspired by Franco-Belgian comics I liked since I was a student. Mostly Moebius's "The Incal", in which there were some scenes where characters would fall indefinitely which inspired me, I used it as a base for Gravity Rush.”
“The characteristic of my games... that would probably the cities perhaps?”
Timeline & Works
Career milestones and all 1 game in the museum they worked on — in the order they happened.
- 1999
Also connected to
- akira yamaoka 共作（silent hill）
Explore the work
Each title has its own page — history, trivia, and collector's notes.