'We just happened to release it into the market at the right time': Even after Elden Ring's DLC victory lap, FromSoftware's Hidetaka Miyazaki still wears the 'soulslike' crown with humility

pcgamer.com:

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.»

It might be easy to see this as a humble auteur, merrily brushing off praise and honours—but he's right, actually. These kinds of naming conventions aren't usually bestowed for the invention of a genre, but rather, they're there as markers for the games that perfected the base formula.

Miyazaki has all the more reason to believe that, because he came to FromSoftware in 2004, a full 10 years after the release of King's Field in 1994. King's Field was an oppressive, mystifying dungeon crawler that often hid even basic mechanics from you. It, itself, has been seeing something of a resurgence as a genre in its own right, with games like Dread Delusion.

So should we be calling them fieldlikes? Not really—here's an archived Gamer's Republic magazine excerpt in which a trio of devs credit 1981's Wizardry for inspiring King's Field: «we really liked a game