“A force of nature that took no prisoners”: A tribute to Ninja Gaiden creator Tomonobu Itagaki | games

gDesigner and former Team Ninja boss Tomonobu Itagaki died last week at the age of 58. He was famous for his sunglasses, long black hair, and leather jackets — and his penchant for using colorful World War II metaphors to describe game development, marketing strategies, and almost anything else. With a feisty talent, he rocked the boat and made waves in almost every aspect of his life.

Itagaki joined Japanese game developer Tecmo in 1992, as a young programmer, where he led the creation of the Dead or Alive fighting game series, the first installment of which was released in 1996. He famously picked up a long-running fight with Namco’s Tekken series, after that company’s marketing team ran an advertisement that he found offensive. The resulting one-sided beef put his fighting franchise on the world stage in the early 2000s. After Dead or Alive 3, he turned his attention to beach volleyball as a palette cleanser, before beginning work on the game that would cement his legacy, the 2004 reinvention of Tecmo’s side-scrolling ninja game, Ninja Gaiden.

During one of the most productive game development processes in the history of video games, Itagaki’s Ninja team produced Dead or Alive 3 and 4, Dead or Alive Ultimate, Ninja Gaiden, Ninja Gaiden Black, Ninja Gaiden II, and two Dead or Alive games Xtreme Beach Volleyball – all for Xbox 360 – as well as Ninja Gaiden: Dragon Sword, a popular game for Nintendo consoles. S. It was an impressively fertile period for one of the most respected development teams in the industry at the time.

I have known Itagaki for nearly 25 years. He was a man who worked hard, played hard, and had a strong sense of loyalty to his friends. We first met at E3 in 2002, when I was editor of Electronic Gaming Monthly, but it was during my time at GMR that we formed our lifelong bond. GMR put three of Itagaki’s games on the cover over the course of two years, and the time I spent on Team Ninja during our coverage gave me a real idea of ​​the kind of guy he was.

He did not suffer fools gladly, but respected people who were honest and straightforward with him. Despite his public persona, he was a mild-mannered, soft-spoken person with a good sense of humour. When he left Tecmo in 2008 – a company he saved from bankruptcy with the Dead or Alive series – his core team of developers went with him, and it was such loyalty that he inspired. And despite the horror stories about hard times in Japanese game development, he wasn’t the type to scream or flip tables – unless you were at karaoke, drinking whiskey and singing Inca (Japanese Sad Poems), when he was attacking the microphone like he was the final boss in Dead or Alive.

He revealed to me a little over a year ago that all this alcoholism was taking its toll, and he had to stop on doctor’s orders, which he did. In September 2025, as I had often done before my trip to Japan, I called him to see if he wanted to get together for dinner. He was happy to see my letter, but, as it turned out, he had been hospitalized for three months at the time I wrote this letter. I visited him just over two weeks before he died. The flowers my wife and I had sent him earlier were still by his bed. He said he could be out of the hospital in about a month, but I wasn’t sure. Although his public-facing persona was intimidating, he had always been a physically thin man; Whenever I hugged him goodbye, it felt like I was hugging a leather jacket on a coat hanger. When doctors finally identified the source of his ailments, it was too little, too late.

The industry has lost one of its most iconic creators: a force of nature who gave millions of people a decade of pure gaming fun. I lost someone I considered a brother. Itagaki was only three years older than me.

He died nearly a decade after his last game, Devil’s Third, shipped on the Wii U. Earlier this year, he told me about his plans to finally create a new game, under his company Itagaki Games. It was very unfortunate that he was unable to complete this final project. “My life was a constant battle. I kept winning. I also caused a lot of trouble along the way. I’m proud that I fought through it all, following my own convictions,” he wrote in his final social media post.

“I have no regrets. I just feel deep sadness that I wasn’t able to present new work to all my fans. That’s how it is. That’s how it goes.”