LAS VEGAS — Ninja Gaiden creator Tomonobu Itagaki almost quit making videogames when his company tricked him into releasing an unfinished title, he said on Thursday.
Itagaki, who has since left Tecmo and started an independent game studio called Valhalla, said in his speech at the annual DICE Summit that he only had two and a half months to port the fighting game Dead or Alive 2 to the PlayStation 2 in time for the home platform’s launch in March 2000.
“All of the staff, led by me, fought for a victory with all their energy,” Itagaki said through an onstage translator. “But unfortunately, the result wasn’t what we expected.”
As the deadline of the PlayStation 2′s launch grew closer, the company’s sales general manager approached Itagaki at his desk.
“Can I borrow a copy of this so I can play it a little?” Itagaki remembers the manager saying.
“I said, sure, yeah, go on, and I handed him the disc which was still under development,” Itagaki said. “But this disc was never played by them.”
Instead, Itagaki said to the crowd of game developers and executives, “it was taken into a factory for production on that day without me knowing it.”
Tecmo, Itagaki said, “made a huge profit.” But the release of what he called an unfinished game sent Itagaki into a spiral of depression.
“I thought I would quit making games,” he said. He started saying home, drinking from morning until night. He’d cry as he watched the movie Armageddon over and over again with his then three-year-old daughter, listening to Aerosmith’s theme song “I Don’t Want to Miss a Thing.”
Eventually, he went back to work with a renewed sense of purpose, creating the follow-up game Dead or Alive 2: Hardcore in the state that he and his team wanted it to be.
“No matter what anyone says, Aerosmith and Armageddon were the ones who saved my life, my company, my friends and my family,” Itagaki concluded.
