On the passing of a legend.
The games industry doesn’t have rock stars. Not really. We have visionaries. We have legends. Geniuses. Auters. Giants. Unsung heroes. Weirdos, cool and otherwise. Fires too hot to last. Tomonobu Itagaki was a rock star. The long hair, the ever-present shades, the cool-as-hell leather jacket. The generational talent for shit-talking. Remember when he made a list of his Top 5 Most Hated Games and they were all Tekken? Or when he clapped back at the DMC4 producer because the guy said he didn’t think Ninja Gaiden: Dragon Sword was an action game because it was on the DS? Or when he asked if the guys who stayed at Team Ninja after he left were doing okay at home when he learned that shaking the Sixaxis in Ninja Gaiden Sigma 2 would make the female characters’ breasts jiggle?
Sure, part of it was a role he was playing up for the cameras – Itagaki was friends with Tekken producer Katsuhiro Harada – but you always got the sense that it wasn’t just a performance. That he was That Guy. Axl Rose come off the stage in an industry of folks who often felt like they were afraid they might say the wrong thing, a designer whose personality was as loud and distinctive as his games.
And he was a hell of a game designer. Ninja Gaiden redefined the action game; Dead or Alive pushed fighting games forward. Itagaki understood that game design and technology were inexorably tied together, and the games he directed were always tightly produced technical marvels. I still remember where I was when I first played Ninja Gaiden for the first time. It felt like someone had ripped my head off, rewired my brain, and stuck it back on. I didn’t know an action game could feel like that. I’m still looking for something that scratches that itch. I’ve never found it.
Itagaki was larger-than-life. Bold, brash, funny, effortlessly cool. A top-shelf hater who spoke his mind in a world obsessed with sticking to PR scripts. He was the greatest action game designer alive, a personality who commanded attention because of who he was, not just what he made. “My life was a series of battles. And I kept on winning,” he wrote in his last Facebook post, published posthumously. Nobody else made games like him. There was nobody else like him. Tomonobu Itagaki was a rock star. Maybe our last one. You know what they say: the great ones never lose; they just run out of time.
I asked Skybox’s staff and contributors to share their thoughts on Itagaki, his work, and his legacy. These are their responses:
Itagaki’s style and approach had a lot of flash and a lot of substance, even if it was without shame. Dead or Alive remains a triumph of the Xbox era and as games moved into HD the fast fluid and bouncy action only popped more. Ninja Gaiden‘s revival from the ashes of obscurity was in large part to Itagaki’s and Team Ninja recognizing how important both technology and design must complement each other. Ninja Gaiden is not only a pillar of the character action genre, but remains one of the most technically impressive achievements in gaming. He was also one of the boldest developers out there, unafraid to give the absolute sickest quotes and interviews. It takes personality to make games with personality, and Itagaki’s legacy will remain as beautiful, stylish, and demanding as everything he was and touched. – Brogan Chattin
Itagaki’s history in the gaming industry is one that’s often complicated by his persona. The signature leather jacket and sunglasses ensemble complemented his brash attitude and outspoken nature regarding the gaming industry in Japan, resulting in him rubbing media and some of his peers the wrong way. However, beyond the persona that can be more accurately described as a wrestling character existing in their kayfabe, Tomonobu Itagaki was a visionary. A pioneer. An unapologetically driven force in the industry that saw exactly what he wanted from it and pushed it forward. His Dead or Alive series made waves as a futuristic fighting game, both in terms of setting and its gameplay. His vision to revive the dormant Ninja Gaiden series into an action game was a master stroke of genius, giving us two of the strongest examples of the genre to this day.
Despite Itagaki’s involvement with both series long being over, his fingerprints as their grand architect can be indirectly seen through games like Tekken, Virtua Fighter, Devil May Cry, and Nioh. Seeing the first Ninja Gaiden on the original Xbox as a teenager is an experience that has never left me, showcasing a type of fast-paced combat that had only been a fantasy in my young mind at the time while challenging me in ways I hadn’t been in a game up to that point. While his last involvement in the gaming industry went out with a whimper, his creation of two pillars of their respective genres (and let’s not forget his start on Tecmo Super Bowl!) ensures his status as a revolutionary in game design.
RIP Tomonobu Itagaki. Your legacy lives on. – Lawrence Maldonado
I didn’t play Itagaki’s games until well after my formative years. But as a child of the internet, I still knew who this guy was and what he did. That was what was so cool about him; he was a known presence in the industry, like a Kojima or Kamiya, but he wasn’t like them. His games were gnarlier, and he was a world class hater. Sure, catching a block on Twitter from Kamiya was a fun meme, but Itagaki was out there talking shit in broad daylight for magazines. That was awesome. And when I did eventually try his work out, even in compromised form (Ninja Gaiden Sigma 1 and 2 on the PS Vita of all things), I immediately recognized that shit-talking wasn’t just hot air. Finally playing Ninja Gaiden made me re-think action games, like fitting a missing piece into an old puzzle I hadn’t yet completed.
Games is a space that loves to want rockstars, but rarely does it see leaders, problematic or otherwise, who are unafraid to publicly bare their fangs and show conviction. We have intellectuals, artists, visionaries, weirdos, and corpo shills. But with Itagaki gone, we’ve lost our hater. Smoke one for a real one. – Lucas White
You don’t get folks like Tomonobu Itagaki very often. Even the “zany” rockstar game developers like Suda 51, Hideki Kamiya, and Hideo Kojima aren’t prone to the sheer levels of shithousery Itagaki was up to. Oftentimes an inflammatory figure, he had a personality you would not get from a modern day “too-much-budget-to-take-any-risks” press tour, and the type of disruption that Josef Fares wishes he could bring to proceedings when he says some naughty words near Geoff Keighley.
His brashness and sense of showmanship also carried over to the games he made. I don’t really like Dead or Alive, but there’s no way to deny those games are stylish, with fantastic animations and setpieces that fighting games wouldn’t adapt to for years. And then Ninja Gaiden‘s reboot took the style to a whole new level. The sheer ability to look and be just so fuckin’ cool while playing Ninja Gaiden is second to none.
I actually had a bigger appreciation for Itagaki after reading Katsuhiro Harada’s long twitter post about their “rivalry” where he admitted after years of trash talking Tekken at every moment he could that “I never had any grudge against you, Namco, or Tekken. On the contrary, I respected you all” and that he viewed Harada as a “comrade-in-arms.” It’s clear he was someone who cared deeply about his games, and creating a massive shitpost of a persona to beef with Tekken purely to get eyes on it is an all-timer baller move. – Scott McCrae
Itagaki’s Ninja Gaiden strikes me as a what-could-have-been in the short history of video games. It came out at a time when we were having a lot of conversations about games’ comparative lack of challenge. A generation that had grown up on the NES was blowing through modern releases like they weren’t there. Then came Ninja Gaiden, a tough-but-fair showcase for whatever skill you thought you possessed.
More importantly, there was Itagaki himself, one of the young industry’s first great weirdos: talking about the Dead or Alive cast as his daughters, threatening journalists with a sword his father made, always looking like the lost fourth member of Guitar Wolf. The developer as misplaced rock star.
We’ll never see another game maker like him, and frankly, it’d be ridiculous for anyone else to try. The position is taken. – Thomas Wilde
As Will mentioned during the intro, playing Ninja Gaiden on the Xbox for the first time was one of those revelatory moments for me as a gamer. That generation saw hit after hit being released each year, and Capcom had already done such a great job redefining what action games could be with Devil May Cry, but Ninja Gaiden was just different. It not only looked futuristic as hell, but it was so smooth to control and so dripping in style that I couldn’t get it out of my head. Some of that was maybe because I was cursing its difficulty balancing (the original version peaks way too early, then seemingly gets easier towards the end), but I felt as if I had played perfection.
Again, much like Will, I don’t know that I’ve ever found another action game that compares. The interstitial puzzle segments feel undercooked, but the combat is so refined, so purposeful, that any misgivings fall away when you get surrounded by enemies. In modern games, I often groan because combat feels sluggish with an emphasis on weighty animations. In Ninja Gaiden, combat elicits excitement because of how fluid it is, not to mention how the game pushes you to become a better player. You learn stronger combos that more efficiently deal with foes not to speed up the process, but because those strings feel good to pull off.
Itagaki was a master of stuff like that. While you could claim Ninja Gaiden is “hard,” I would argue that it is “challenging.” It’s a game that demands you care about it, and in turn, you learn to overcome its obstacles. Until you do, you’re going to get your ass handed to you. That isn’t an entirely lost art nowadays, but Itagaki did it better than most. He was certainly the best at it before the introduction of the HD-era. Maybe I have him to blame for my desire for challenge in games, but I really wouldn’t have it any other way.
RIP Itagaki-san. You were a legend that won’t be soon forgotten. – Peter Glagowski
