‘It’s like stepping into another world’: how Covid affected the eerie city of Ghostwire: Tokyo

Tango Gameworks' developers spent years imagining a Tokyo cleared by a terrible event - then lockdown emptied the streets, bringing an uncanny reality to their paranormal visions

Making games is a long old road - five years or more, often, from conception to actual release - and when Kenji Kimura was stuck for ideas on the game he was directing, Ghostwire: Tokyo, he would wander the streets of Tokyo for inspiration. Walking around the back alleys of Shibuya, where the city's ultra-modern architecture rubs up against old shrines and traditional houses, he would imagine a Tokyo eerily emptied of people by a paranormal event; what it would look like, how it would feel. Then, a few years into the production of Ghostwire: Tokyo, something similar happened. Like many cities across the world, Tokyo was suddenly deserted as people were confined to their homes in the early stages of the pandemic.

It suddenly felt so spooky walking in the city, because we had to be afraid of a thing that we cannot see," says Kimura. If we needed to go somewhere, we wouldn't deviate from the shortest path." The team he was directing at Tango Gameworks moved from their Shibaura office to home-working, finishing off their game about a ghostly city while living in one.