Legendary Resident Evil creator Shinji Mikami has revealed that he didn’t play the fifth installment in his famous series until last year.

In an interview now up at CVG.com, Mikami claims he couldn’t face the game – the first full Resident Evil title made without him – for a full two years after Capcom sent him a copy.

“I didn’t play Resident Evil 5 until a year ago, which was long after it came out,” he said. “They sent me a copy, but I didn’t open it for a long time. Whether the game was good or bad, I knew that someone other than me had made it so it would be different to my style. I didn’t like the idea of that.”

After pretty much single-handedly establishing survival-horror as a genre with 1996′s groundbreaking original, Mikami went on to work on a number of popular sequels before redefining the series completely with the hugely successful Resident Evil 4. Having left Capcom, Mikami is now hard at work as the director of Tango Gameworks, where he is heading a new horror project codenamed ‘Zwei’.

Resident Evil 5 was released in 2009 to mixed reviews, while the upcoming Resident Evil 6 has also faced a storm of criticism from fans unhappy at the series’ more action-orientated change of direction.