Tomonobu Itagaki has died at the age of 58 following a serious illness. Itagaki was an absolutely transformative figure in contemporary action games thanks to his work at Tecmo, the company he joined in 1992: he led Team Ninja and spearheaded the revival of Ninja Gaiden, as well as creating the Dead or Alive series. He would leave Tecmo under a cloud in 2008, before founding Valhalla Game Studios and releasing Devil's Third on Wii U.
Itagaki was known for his sunglasses, pockmarked skin and outspoken interviews, but it was the fact that he and Team Ninja could back up the bluster that made him one of the great creators of the early 2000s. The first 3D Ninja Gaiden, released in 2004, took on Capcom and DMC at its own game and, by my reckoning anyway, beat it handily. That and Ninja Gaiden 2 remain two of the finest hack-and-slash games ever made.
The news of Itagaki's death comes from a post to his Facebook page, and PCG has been able to confirm the news via a personal friend of the late developer. That post is titled "Words to Leave" and begins, via machine translation:
The light of my life is about to run out.
The fact that this sentence has been posted means it's finally time. I'm no longer in this world.
This is followed by a note saying the next lines are for someone special, likely to be Itagaki's daughter:
My life has been a series of battles. We stayed winning.
I've caused a lot of trouble.
I stand by my beliefs and I own them.
No regrets.
Itagaki's final game turned out to be Devil's Third, an ambitious but ill-starred attempt to blend the FPS and third-person combat genres. Itagaki dissolved Valhalla Game Studios in 2021, founding Itagaki games, which was working on an unannounced title for current platforms.
"Today I lost someone who was truly like a brother to me," James Mielke wrote on Bluesky, accompanied by a photo of the pair together. "I am gutted to the core. I guess I can say so now that it's on his Facebook page. He even listed himself as my actual brother on Facebook. Anyone who knows me knows how close we were. RIP, senpai. You will always be a ninja."
Itagaki was always a man for fighting talk, and would forever choose the underdog's side. As he said in 2007, "I like to support people who are trying to challenge the status quo, and do new things." One way this manifested, oddly enough, was his backing for Microsoft and the Xbox in the early 2000s, because he (accurately) foresaw the challenges it would face in Japan, and was thus determined to be a high-profile Japanese creator working on that hardware.
Team Ninja and Itagaki would deliver some of Xbox's greatest early exclusives, and the enduring impact of their work can be seen in the fact that one of this month's biggest releases is the long-awaited Ninja Gaiden 4, this time co-developed by Team Ninja (sans Itagaki) and PlatinumGames. Itagaki was always amusing about the difficulty of his games, which he would insist was essential, and absolutely withering about the influence of "American marketers" on his beloved videogames.
Itagaki explained his philosophy of game creation to Game Developer magazine in 2007:
"In Japan, there is a saying, 'kachoufuugetsu', which is 'flowers, birds, wind, and the moon.' That basically is a vague summary of things that human beings might find appealing. You look at a flower and say, 'Oh, this is beautiful.' You look at a bird that can fly, whereas humans can't, and we see it as a symbol of freedom, something to aspire to. The wind, you know, if you were to have a cool wind blowing, that would help to convey your mood at that moment. And looking at the moon, you may think that not only is it visually beautiful, but it may bring to mind things like wanting to see the moon, wanting to go to the moon, and wanting to know what's there. That sort of inquisitiveness.
"So, I think that if you look at those key human emotions that cross national boundaries, and don't rely on the circumstances surrounding each country, then it's relatively easy to make a game that can be enjoyed anywhere. Although obviously if you send somebody out there to look at flowers and they say, 'I don't like flowers. Why did you send me to look at flowers?' Those are the kind of people that I just have to say that this game might not turn out to be for you. I wonder what would happen if I said this to a marketer, and he said, 'Well we have conducted focus testing that concludes that flowers are no longer popular!' But once again, that's just my kind of approach. That's my philosophy."
Tomonobu Itagaki was born in Tokyo on April 1, 1967, and died at the age of 58. As his greatest games show, he was a true ninja master. His final message ends with a Vonnegut-inflected farewell to players:
I just feel so sorry to all my fans that I can't deliver my new work: sorry
It is what it is.
So it goes.
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