How GungHo launched its bubblegum fighting game Ninjala in the pandemic

Posted byby Dean Takahashi
July 25, 2021
Updated June 19, 2025
8 min

I interviewed Kazuki Morishita, the president of GungHo Entertainment, during the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) in 2018 in Los Angeles. That seems like ages ago, and GungHo was getting ready to launch its bubblegum fighting game Ninjala.

It was a lighthearted title that was aimed at a broad audience, where you could play as a kid with funny weapons that you could use to whack other kids. It’s a bit like Nintendo’s Splatoon, but instead of shooting with paint, you hit each other with bats and craft new weapons from bubble gum.

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Written by

Dean Takahashi

Dean Takahashi is editorial director for GamesBeat. He has been a tech journalist since 1988, and he has covered games as a beat since 1996. He was lead writer for GamesBeat at VentureBeat from 2008 to April 2025. Prior to that, he wrote for the San Jose Mercury News, the Red Herring, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and the Dallas Times-Herald. He is the author of two books, "Opening the Xbox" and "The Xbox 360 Uncloaked." He organizes the annual GamesBeat Next, GamesBeat Summit and GamesBeat Insider Series: Hollywood and Games conferences and is a frequent speaker at gaming and tech events. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.