Special Feature: Sushi Bar Rock Star - An Obituary for Tomonobu Itagaki
A late night turned for us into an all-nighter when it was announced that Tomonobu Itagaki passed away at 58. We're big fans of his work on the blog despite being a fairly controversial figure, so we figured it was as good a time as any to do a writeup on his career and offer some insight on a figure who's pretty instrumental in the modern gaming landscape despite being someone you may not have heard much about over the past decade.
Come along with Ash as she takes you on a tour through Itagaki's career on absolutely no sleep!
Japanese social media was abuzz this morning with outpourings of grief and support for one of Japan's first celebrity developers, and certainly one of Japan's first celebrity developers to break out onto the world stage. Longtime hardcore gamers will be well familiar with Tomonobu Itagaki, Tecmo's wunderkind that pulled them out of a business slump in the mid-late 90s, but despite his fingerprints being all over modern gaming as a whole his name has rarely been uttered in roughly a decade, particularly in the west. Indeed it's not hard at all to imagine that people who haven't been around as long or as deeply into the industry as Larsa and I might not even know of Itagaki as an individual as opposed to his works, but his importance in the modern gaming landscape is hard to understate.
Starting his career in 1992 as a graphic programmer on Tecmo Super Bowl, Tokyo native Itagaki joined up with Tecmo, casually musing that his choice in company was simply because it was closer to his house than others. Despite a decade long history of iconic games largely in the Japanese market, Tecmo had begun to lose steam in the early-mid 90s due to a lack of hit new titles ultimately resulting in two back to back years of mounting deficit. Given mounting financial pressure, a relative rookie Tomonobu Itagaki makes a promise to then-president of Tecmo Junji Nakamura: to make a game that will sell.
Sitting down with American television for an interview somewhere between late 2003 and the middle of 2004, Itagaki is a peculiar sight the near complete antithesis of the vision of a Japanese game developer one might have at the time. Rather than a bookish, nerdy and reserved gentleman, Itagaki wears a leather jacket and dark sunglasses. He has long hair and a cool demeanor, coming across more like a rock star as he lights up a cigarette than someone like Nintendo's family-friendly Shigeru Miyamoto ever could. He professes a philosophy of always playing to win in life. He relaxes in his chair, arm casually sprawled across the headrest. "Well, I think entertainment needs sexuality and violence. So, if entertainment lacks sexual elements, then it's entertainment no more."
Itagaki's carefully curated image of a rock star badboy is no mistake. Frequently outspoken and willing to give frank opinions on every game and industry figure you ask him about, Itagaki is combative and controversial, breaking all kinds of social mores of Japanese society seemingly as easy as he takes drags from his cigarettes. He knows how to market himself well and draw attention, and as competition in the fighting game space heated up in the 90s with the genre hitting what is now looked at as its golden age, Itagaki's promise takes the form of a 3D fighting game built on the same hardware that powers Sega's paradigm shift Virtua Fighter. Itagaki's Dead or Alive is a fast paced, smoothly animated game with incredible graphics for its time that graphically surpassed even Sega's genre defining hit that dominated arcades. But the most important part of selling any product is actually drawing attention to it, and Itagaki has the magic bullet for that.
Given his origins as a graphic programmer it's not much wonder why Itagaki's mind turns to the graphics to set his game apart from the competition. And for a man who's clearly very clever when it comes to marketing, it's even less wonder that he is keenly aware that sex sells. Dead or Alive has a comparatively high number of female characters for its time, and their models are rendered impeccably. The designs are varied, there are plenty of alternate outfits, and there's a noticeable amount of jiggle physics. The Dead or Alive series' main cultural legacy is that of Itagaki's "daughters" as he calls them, but they are genuinely good fighting games and my personal favorite 3D fighters. In their time they were looked at increasingly as technical powerhouses that were somehow as fun to play as they were to watch the spectacle of, and in an era where fighting games became increasingly complex Dead or Alive's relatively simple but deceptively complex mechanics meant that it was relatively easy to pick up and play casually.
It's hard to imagine a time where fighting games, a genre that has only recently come back into vogue as more than a niche, sold systems, but Dead or Alive was a genuine system mover for Microsoft's original Xbox with its third entry. Dead or Alive 2: Hardcore, the PS2 port of the second title, holds the distinction as being one of the best reviewed fighting games of all time, and it's not hard to see why when you get your hands on it. The gameplay holds up incredibly well, and its Y2kcore aesthetic has somehow only gotten more appealing with age.
Fiercely protective over his "daughters", Itagaki forked the Dead or Alive series off into an unexpected direction with the Xtreme Beach Volleyball series. Xtreme is, essentially, a vacation simulator that allows players to select one of the series' female characters for an island getaway that features an array of mini games, social mechanics, a surprising, cleverly thematic layer of character customization and plenty of the titular volleyball. Despite Itagaki's earlier claims of the necessity of sexuality in entertainment, by the second mainline game in the series he begins to feel as though sexuality had become too much of a focus of the series and created Xtreme to act as something of a 'firewall' to hopefully siphon some of the horny away from the mainline titles, even mentioning that while he understands the desire to undress the characters that people who mod the games to do so should be ashamed of themselves.
This willingness to be frank and direct with customers and industry contemporaries alike is another aspect of Itagaki's image, which saw him making controversial statements and sparking rivalries with all sorts of figures from Namco's Katsuhiro Harada to Capcom's Hideki Kamiya, and it is with Itagaki's connection to Kamiya that perhaps Itagaki's influence is both most felt and least identified with him.
Hideki Kamiya, creator of Devil May Cry, is a similarly brash and opinionated game dev. These days he's most well known for being a lovable grouch on Twitter, announcing his intent to block a huge number of people who interact with him and even punching back against urges to take up nationalistic viewpoints. But in the leadup to the release of Bayonetta in 2008 Kamiya offered his opinion that action games hadn't evolved in the past 8 years since he'd made Devil May Cry. Itagaki, never one to shy away from controversy himself, responded in kind. "He said something like 'has Kamiya been asleep for 8 years?'" Kamiya recalled.
Having been responsible for NES icon Ninja Gaiden's 2004 reboot that was a huge success, Itagaki offered a vision for action games that had many of the hallmarks of Dead or Alive, from the fluid animation and speedy gameplay to the spectacle with an unbelievable level of graphical fidelity. But much like its NES predecessor, 2004's Ninja Gaiden reboot was incredibly difficult, and Itagaki made various statements over the years defending the idea of difficult video games.
While FromSoftware toiled in relative obscurity with things like King's Field and Shadow Tower, Tomonobu Itagaki's Ninja Gaiden reboot created a mainstream desire for 'masocore' titles that would eventually blossom into the market space for extremely punishing titles such as Dark Souls. His uncompromising attitude on the necessity of difficulty in games pushed forward and helped solidify the idea of the 'hardcore gamer' that played the aforementioned brutally difficult games as a badge of honor. The identity of 'gamer' has had a lot of, shall we say, mixed results in our culture - but in my estimation Ninja Gaiden is an extremely crucial point in for formation of that identity.
Itagaki oversaw several Dead or Alive and Ninja Gaiden titles with a very distinct directorial style, his Team Ninja essentially single handedly saving Tecmo's hide and bringing them to prominence with games that were wildly successful in their day but have since faded in direct relevancy. His relationship with Tecmo crumbled shortly before the release of Ninja Gaiden 2 in 2006 as a sexual harassment case against Itagaki broke, wherein it was alleged that he had made advances towards an employee over a period of three years. Itagaki admitted that he had an affair with the employee but insisted that everything that happened was consensual between them, and internal investigations ultimately accused the employee of "venting frustrations about the affair" and sexual harassment charges were ultimately dropped.
For his part, Itagaki filed suit against Tecmo for essentially humiliating him in front of colleagues and withholding bonus pay. In his typical swaggering fashion he quickly announced the formation of a new studio and a new game in development. Itagaki's first and only time helming another project, Devil's Third, was released in 2015 and was so disastrously received outside of Japan that it essentially finished him in the industry despite high hopes for the game and even expressing the desire to make another game.
His former Team Ninja has released two middlingly received Dead or Alive titles since his ousting, with Itagaki railing against them for leaning too hard into sexuality. It was a stunning turn for a man who once championed sexuality in his games, but on brand with his very particular sensibilities needing to be upheld. Notably he would be correct, as the infamous 'Core Values' debacle at EVO Japan 2019 completely kneecapped the series' future seemingly indefinitely. Much better received has been their work on the incredible Nioh franchise that even features some loving nods to Ninja Gaiden, and which we have written about extensively (you can read those pieces HERE and HERE). Their legacy in the action and masocore genres continues to be one of quality and I personally have high hopes for the upcoming Ninja Gaiden 4.
Itagaki is a complicated figure in the industry. Clearly possessing a keen eye for marketing and more than a few good ideas, those good ideas seemingly ultimately ran a little short after his departure from Tecmo. His legacy and body of work will always be overshadowed by his sexual assault charges, that all who have lived through the #MeToo movement will recognize as being extremely hard to prove or get justice for even when they're essentially admitted to, regardless of the dismissal of the aforementioned charges. And although plenty of friction has come from the idea of the 'hardcore' gamer, it seems self evident that Dark Souls and games like it are able to flourish in large part because Ninja Gaiden created a mainstream demand for extremely punishing action games.
His final words to the world are acknowledgement for having caused trouble for a lot of people, apologizing to his fans for not being able to create a new game before passing. "That's just how it is" he writes. One can imagine the puff of smoke he would exhale while saying that, his stoic poker face kept to the end. For Itagaki, who always played to win, the game continues on in spirit, with Team Ninja announcing that they intend to carry on his philosophy and creativity through future games.
