After Tomonobu Itagaki left Tecmo, he gave hints as to his next project but hasn't confirmed anything solid until he recently talked to Famitsu in his first Japanese gaming press interview in two years. He confirmed that he's working at a new company called Valhalla Game Studios as development department and game design lead, while Satoshi Kanematsu (another former Tecmo developer who has worked on Rygar) will manage the company.
"Valhalla is about 50 people right now," said Itagaki [thanks 1UP]. "That may expand a bit, but it's not going to be a 100-person company. 50 people working for two years can produce something better than 100 people working for one year. 100 times 1 and 50 times 2 may produce the same number, but not in creative businesses like this one. I know nobody means any harm by it, but publicly-traded companies have to prove their worth to the stock market on a year-by-year basis, and that means they can't focus all-out on quality. We're creators here; we like making things more than doing math."
Itagaki was candid about his motivations for going this path and why the Japanese gaming industry is struggling. "I think success in games comes when you satisfy all three pieces of the game business: the players, the developers, and the links between them -- the retail and media people,” continued Itagaki. “I've been making games for nearly 20 years and I've done that maybe two or three times. It's definitely hard, but it's not impossible -- all three groups are there for the games, after all. The thing is that I think the Japanese industry has made achieving that all but impossible these days. There's an equation you can use to satisfy all three groups, but once money enters the picture, you start neglecting the things that're most important and the equation winds up unsolvable. My friends and I went independent because we were wasting our time wrangling with issues like that."
While Itagaki declined to speak about what Valhalla was working on, he was definitive that his next title would not be a fighting game. "I already made Dead or Alive, the best fighting game in the world, in my last company," commented Itagaki. "Trying to compete against my own daughter wouldn't be worth the fight. Fighting games are kind of at another dead end right now, but you could say the genre would've died ages ago if DOA wasn't around. We saw ourselves as a counterbalance to the fighting-game norm back then, and without that sort of presence in the genre, it's just going to keep shrinking in size. Someone needs to step up and change things."
Whatever he'll do next, Itagaki is shooting for the stars sales-wise. "Dead or Alive 3 was the best game I made saleswise -- it did two million copies," noted Itagaki. "For this game, I'd like to at least double that and get four million people to play it. You have games selling 10 million these days, after all, so I don't think throwing out the four-million figure's that outrageous."
2 Comments
March 3, 2010
I love his crazy ass comments:
"I already made Dead or Alive, the best fighting game in the world, in my last company".
I'm a huge fan of the DOA series but there are other fighting series I like better. I am glad to see him back though. I can't wait to see what he comes up with next.
March 3, 2010
Yes, the first thing I thought was "Humbled and chastened by our experiences, eh Itagaki?" His next project will attract a lot of attention, whatever it is.