Recognizing the GOAT: Hidetaka Miyazaki

 Hidetaka Miyazaki is the current company president of FromSoftware, and also serves as a creative director, writer, and designer of the games made at the studio. 

Mentioned in my welcome post, he is responsible for leading the creation of not only the genre-defining Dark Souls, but also nearly all of the studio's other critically acclaimed titles such as Bloodborne, Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice, Elden Ring, as well as some influence on the Armored Core series. 

Miyazaki is regarded as one of the greatest game designers to ever live for good reason. He has not only a large portfolio of extremely well-received games, but his design has a unique flavor to it that not many other designers have adopted which is the influence of literature on his work. Much of Miyazaki's inspiration for video games actually comes from various literature he is fond of, such as the works of H.P Lovecraft and George R.R. Martin (who actually collaborated with Miyazaki on Elden Ring) as well as famous Japanese manga artists such as Kentaro Miura (Berserk) and Hirihiko Araki (JoJo's Bizarre Adventure). Without Miyazaki, the signature style of games that FromSoftware has pioneered simply wouldn't be possible, and for that, he can most certainly be considered the GOAT.