The Screenwriter Who Made Game Stories Matter: Remembering Noboru Sugimura, the Man Behind Resident Evil and Onimusha

This September brings two milestones for Capcom fans: Onimusha: Way of the Sword launches September 4, and a new Resident Evil film hits theatres September 18. Both franchises owe a debt to one man few overseas players have ever heard of — Noboru Sugimura, a veteran TV screenwriter whose arrival at Capcom in the 1990s is credited, in the words of producer Yoshiki Okamoto, with turning game writing from an amateur sideline into a professional craft.

• Who: Noboru Sugimura (杉村升), a working TV and tokusatsu screenwriter before joining Capcom's orbit in the 1990s
• Known for (TV): Taiyo ni Hoero!, Sukeban Deka, Kyoryu Sentai Zyuranger
• Known for (games): rewriting Resident Evil 2's story before release; co-founding Flagship, the studio behind Onimusha, Onimusha 2, and Dino Crisis
• Later work: Flagship went on to support Nintendo's The Legend of Zelda and Kirby development
• Died: 2005, according to Okamoto's own account

Who was Noboru Sugimura?

According to Okamoto, game scenarios in early-1990s Capcom were written in-house by whoever on staff happened to have a knack for it in school — everything else about a game got a professional's touch, but the writing didn't. Sugimura was different: a genuine industry veteran with television and tokusatsu credits already behind him, including the long-running cop drama Taiyo ni Hoero!, the action series Sukeban Deka, and the tokusatsu hit Kyoryu Sentai Zyuranger. To a team used to amateur scripts, having a working professional in the room was, in Okamoto's telling, a turning point for the whole medium.

How did one line of dialogue change everything?

Okamoto recalls Sugimura's first real brush with Capcom coming after he played the original Resident Evil. He liked the game overall, but flagged one moment: a door, late in the story, whose examine-text described it in a way that didn't read as anyone's actual voice — not narration, not the player character, just a strangely disembodied line. It was a small thing, but Okamoto says it was the moment he realized Sugimura was thinking about scenario writing on a level nobody at Capcom had reached yet.

Why did he tell Capcom to scrap Resident Evil 2 and start over?

Soon after, Okamoto invited Sugimura to see Resident Evil 2, which was deep in development at Capcom's Osaka studio and close to finished. Sugimura's verdict, as Okamoto remembers it, was blunt: "It's all wrong — start over." Rather than dismiss the note, Okamoto brought in director Shinji Mikami and convinced the team to rebuild the game's scenario from scratch. The rewritten Resident Evil 2 went on to become one of the best-selling games of its era.

What was Flagship, and what did it make?

Following that success, Sugimura moved fully into games. Okamoto became president and Sugimura a director of Flagship, a Capcom subsidiary set up in Tokyo's Ginza district to focus purely on scenario and development work. The office drew in veteran TV and film writers — by Okamoto's account, an unusually senior group for a game studio at the time. Flagship wrote the scenarios for Onimusha and Onimusha 2, as well as Dino Crisis, before growing into a full development studio that contributed to Nintendo's The Legend of Zelda and Kirby series.

What made his writing process so unusual?

Okamoto describes one habit of Sugimura's that he says he never came close to matching: Sugimura could apparently sense, from the very first line of a script, almost exactly how many characters the finished piece would run — without ever seeming to think about pacing or length as he wrote. Most writers wrestle with a word count as they go; by Okamoto's account, Sugimura had the whole shape of a story mapped out before he'd written a word of it.

What was he like outside the writers' room?

For all his professional discipline, Okamoto remembers Sugimura as someone who let his guard down completely once the script was done. On one memorable business trip to Santa Monica, Sugimura — who didn't speak English — left the room choice to Okamoto at check-in and ended up, half as a joke, in a room overlooking the parking lot instead of the ocean. He was not pleased. On the same trip, spotting a Japanese woman at a nearby table, he abandoned breakfast rather than be overheard speaking broken English in front of her. Small, human moments like these are part of why Okamoto still talks about him so fondly decades later.

Why does his legacy matter this September?

Sugimura died in 2005, still relatively young, and Okamoto has said the games industry lost him far too soon. But the standard he set — that a game's story deserves the same craft as its programming or art — is still the foundation both Resident Evil and Onimusha build on today. As Onimusha: Way of the Sword and the new Resident Evil film both reach audiences this month, it's worth remembering the screenwriter who helped convince Capcom that game stories were worth taking seriously in the first place.