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The director of the Ninja Gaiden and Dead or Alive series of games Tomonobu Itagaki has revealed he’s established a new studio away from former employers Tecmo and Valhalla Game Studios called Itagaki Games.
Itagaki made the announcement via his Facebook page, publishing a full transcript of an interview he conducted with Bloomberg for the outlet’s recent history of Xbox article. He said “For the past four years, I’ve been teaching job to foster juniors, but now I feel like I want to make a game again and just established a company for that purpose.”
Itagaki also made it very clear he’d like to work with Xbox again with his new studio, calling upon his experience with bringing former Xbox exclusives Dead or Alive and Ninja Gaiden to Microsoft’s console, saying: “Back then, I asked him, are you confident that you will beat PS2? He said yes. Xbox is called “Project Midway” and I’ll gain the supremacy with it. That’s why I trusted him and actually created Xbox-exclusive games for about 10 years.”
He also added: “20 years have passed since then, and I established my own company, Itagaki Games, which is not Tecmo, nor Valhalla. I know Microsoft is still aggressive. If they reach out to me, it will be an honor for me.”
At the time of writing, there’s no word on what Itagaki Games might be working on, with 2015’s Devil’s Third for the Nintendo Wii U being his most recent title. Still, it’ll certainly be interesting to see what may lie in the future from this fledging studio.
