Ninja Gaiden’s Itagaki has a new studio and would be ‘honored’ to work with Xbox

Ninja Gaiden director Tomonobu Itagaki returned to game development with a newly formed studio, he revealed.

In a post on his Facebook page, the designer revealed that he had created Itagaki Games, a new studio independent from his former employers Tecmo and Valhalla.

“For the past four years I have been teaching jobs to promote juniors, but now I feel like I want to remake a game and just started a business for that purpose,” he writes.

The 53-year-old designer and his Ninja Gaiden team have been behind Tecmo’s greatest games for nearly two decades, including the Dead or Alive series and Ninja Gaiden’s Xbox reboot.

However, Itagaki had a very public falling out with his employer following the release of Ninja Gaiden II in 2008, which saw him leave the company and file a million dollar lawsuit alleging unpaid bonuses and ” misleading statements ”.

After the split, Itagaki founded Valhalla Game Studios, the developer behind the criticized Wii U title Devil’s Third. In 2017, he resigned from his post of director and took on an advisory role.

Devil’s Third was a rare deviation from Xbox platforms for Itagaki, but even this game was originally intended to be an Xbox 360 exclusive, according to the designer, with Microsoft saying it partially funded Valhalla’s training. Due to the company’s shift to focus on Kinect, Devil’s Third eventually switched to THQ (and later Nintendo).

Thanks to the original Xbox successes Dead or Alive 3 and Ninja Gaiden, Itagaki remains a key figure in platform history and recently contributed to a Bloomberg feature marking Xbox 20.^e anniversary.

Itagaki’s Facebook comments came from an unedited interview he originally submitted for the feature, to which the designer said he wouldn’t have contributed without the large number of Xbox fans anticipating his next game.

When asked if he would consider working with Microsoft again in the future, Itagaki said he would be “honored” to join his former partner.

“I started over with the questions I had asked [original Xbox designer] Seamus [Blackley] two decades ago, ”he wrote. “At the time, I asked him, ‘Are you sure you can beat the PS2?’ And he said, ‘Yes. The Xbox is called Project Midway and I will gain supremacy with it.

“That’s why I trusted him and created Xbox exclusive games for ten years. 20 years have passed since then, and I have created my own company, Itagaki Games, which is neither Tecmo nor Valhalla. I know Microsoft is still aggressive. If they contact me, it will be an honor for me.

Xbox has openly expressed its willingness to acquire an Asian game developer, “including a Japanese studio”, on several occasions.

According to a Bloomberg report from November 2020, Xbox is continuing discussions with Japanese game developers “ big and small ” as it continues its search for studio acquisitions in the country, with several Japanese companies privately indicating that they had been approached by Microsoft to buy their businesses. .

Microsoft is stepping up its efforts in Japan with its latest console launch. The Xbox Series X and S launched day in and day out with other territories on November 10 (up from a year later with his previous console) and Xbox boss Phil Spencer has said he intends to serve the needs better. Japanese players of this generation of consoles.