Shinji Mikami is one of those people in the gaming industry that you just have to follow. After creating Resident Evil, he went on to make some of the most well-known, and not so well-known titles, of our generation. While his latest title, Shadows of the Damned, failed to ignite sales mostly due to EA’s non-existent marketing, it appears that Mikami still has some fight left in him.

If you’ve been out of the loop for a while, Mikami is now executive producer of Tango Gameworks. Tango is one of the newest acquisitions of ZeniMax, the parent company of Bethesda Softworks. It’s here that Mikami is working on his next title: a survival-horror game codenamed “Zwei.”

Here’s what the official Tango Web site has to say about Zwei:

Our latest project’s codename is “Zwei” and it is a survival horror game. The above image is a collage of different environments we put together for this announcement and is intended to give a feel for the tone and the direction the production is taking. (However, neither the code name nor the image is intended to tell you exactly what is in the game.)

As a master of the ‘survival horror’ genre, Shinji Mikami is committed to making a game that is the realization of pure survival horror, an experience which he defines as one that pushes the limits of fear and exhilaration. He and his team at Tango are committed to attaining this vision.

What’s most interesting is that Mikami is quoted at the bottom as saying that he’s striving for “pure survival-horror.” If that’s the case, count me as excited. While Mikami is no doubt a genius for revitalizing Resident Evil with the famous fourth installment, it’s the earlier titles that are really near and dear to my heart.

While we don’t have anything to go off of yet, the team did provide the aforementioned collage of concept art. Here’s the collage in its entirety:

As you can see, the environments are fairly diverse. We have what looks like a watchtower over a village or maybe even a concentration camp, an old ship at a port and what looks like the inside of a submarine among other visuals. All I know is that it’s dark and brooding so I like it.

What do you think of Mikami going back to survival horror? What do you think the concept art means? Let us know in the comments.

[h/t: Bethesda Blog]