He dressed in black and always wore sunglasses. But beyond that, there was something different about Tomonobu Itagaki.
Sadly, it was announced yesterday by Team Ninja that he passed away at age 58.
Itagaki was flamboyant, but that helped him stand out among the plentiful Japanese game developers. He was creator of the fighting game series Dead or Alive, and he helped turn that franchise into a beach volleyball game where realistic-looking women in bikinis bounced around the sandy courts. And he was also the creator of Ninja Gaiden, an influential fighting game.
On his Facebook page, Itagaki seemingly posted his own death, entitled “Last Words.”
“The flame of my life is finally about to go out,” Itagaki wrote. “If this message has been posted, that means the time has come — I am no longer in this world. (This final post has been entrusted to someone dear to me.)
My life was a constant battle. And I kept on winning. I also caused a lot of trouble along the way. I take pride in having fought through it all, following my own convictions. I have no regrets. I only feel deep sorrow that I couldn’t deliver a new work to all my fans. That’s just how it is.
Itagaki closed with a quote from Kurt Vonnegut’s fatalistic novel Slaughterhouse-Five, “So it goes.” This is one of my favorite novels of all time. I’ll miss Itagaki’s flair.
He was different, and I wrote about this in my book, Opening the Xbox. This difference showed when many Japanese game companies shunned the Xbox team, which had been started by an American company, Microsoft. In the months leading up to the launch, it was hard for Microsoft’s Xbox team to pry the Japanese game developers away from Sony and Nintendo. But Itagaki, who was already legendary at the time, took a meeting.
In Japan, he met with the crew of Seamus Blackley, one of the instigators of the Xbox. At the headquarters of publisher Tecmo, Blackley showed off Xbox demos to Itagaki, who was open minded for a Japanese developer. Tecmo itself was an underdog among the Japanese companies, and so Itagaki felt some kinship to the underdogs at Xbox. In a rare honor, Itagaki invited Blackley over to his apartment for dinner. Eventually, Tecmo made Dead or Alive 3 into an Xbox exclusive for a limited time — back in the days when Xbox was getting stonewalled by everyone else.
Itagaki didn’t want to show Dead or Alive 3 off too early, as he was a perfectionist. But at once of the early E3 shows for Xbox, Itagaki showed a trailer for the game and it became one of the most impressive upcoming titles on the Xbox that helped swing the public in favor of the game system, which took off when it debuted in November 2001.
In 2008, before the release of Ninja Gaiden II, Itagaki resigned from Tecmo and sued the company for withholding a bonsu from him. In 2010, he started a new game studio, Valhalla Game Studios, to make a title called Devil’s Third. In 2021, he started yet another game studio, Itagaki Games. The studio appeared to dissolve in October 2024, but then it was learned that he had renamed the studio as Itagaki Games Co. Ltd.