Not exactly breaking news but didn’t notice talk of it in other NG-related threads.
Whoops, Lizard King did mention this in a NG2 thread but search failed me :(
Couldn’t they just say they didn’t give him his bonus because he was being sued by female employees for sexual harassment?
For everything I’ve heard about this guy, I wouldn’t be surprised if he was a complete intolerable ass who finally crossed the line with the CEO.
I mean, it’s not every day that a game developer gets sued for sexual harassment, let alone in Japan of all places.
Can’t he be attributed for the “boob physics” concept?
This explains his comments about how he’s not going to make any more Ninja Gaidens or DOAs.
One question that has been bothering me, now that Itagaki no longer works for Tecmo does he still recieve royalites based on NG 2 considering he was the lead designer (or was he the director of it?).
Almost 100% certain the answer is no. The IP is owned by Tecmo. That’s how it works in the game industry. Once you leave a company, you get absolutely nothing for anything you created there, present or future.
All depends on his contract.
He always sounded like a total jerk in interviews, so I hope he comes through this ok. And by ok, I mean I hope he gets a nice job at some small company with no women where no one will care what he’s doing enough to offer interviews.
I don’t know where I read it, maybe a comment on 1up, but they were talking about his displeasure at Ninja Gaiden Sigma for the PS3. Was there any news on this reported that I missed? Now that I think about it, I bet he lost alot of deals from his contract on the fact that he quit and was not fired.
here is the story where he basically kick the developer who worked sigma in the nut.
http://www.computerandvideogames.com/article.php?id=189396
Itagaki is unique for a japanese, he is not humble like most of the developers, and he talk a lot of smacks for someone that make money off bouncing boobs and extreme gore.
In other words, he’s a douchebag.
I think the sexism in DoA is excessive and one could argue the same for the gore in Ninja Gaiden, et al, but the games he produces are genuinely fun and well-designed and worth playing on their own merits in spite of the silly stuff on top.
IMO.
He does seem like the Japanese version of (the pre-Ion Storm-implosion) John Romero, though, so I’m not defending him on a personal level.
I think he is hilarious. One of the old Xbox magazines used to have a column called Ask Itagaki or something like that. They asked him 5 questions a month. It was the best part of the magazine.
Well, I’m defending him on a personal level. I don’t like many of his games, but the ones I do are among my all time favorites.
In that same vein, his interviews are just about the only developer interviews that are guaranteed a read from me just from knowing who they are talking to. Right or wrong, he’s never boring, and that’s something worthwhile. Like Suda51 or Hideo Kojima, I don’t have to like everything he does or says in order to be glad he’s around, even if it’s to give people food for thought in an adversarial manner.
Some say douchebag, some say full of fucking awesome. I love the guy. Pretentious and smarmy like Dyack? Sure. But he actually backs up his smack talk.
You know, I’m torn on this, because I hold no personal animus to the guy, but he seems to me to be the worst human shaped thing in the games industry today. The man is a walking PR disaster, and I don’t think he’s much of a designer either. I know a lot of people love Ninja Gaiden, but doing everything you can to make your game difficult and frustrating seems to me to be entirely wrongheaded, and every single time I’ve tried to get into that game (and I’ve tried…maybe Sigma will help me out more, since he hated it so much), I’ve bounced off of it somewhere between the beefy nunchuck swinging jerk that’s actually a friend who beats you to death and the horseback guy (a.k.a. The Worst Boss Ever). Dead or Alive always seemed like a second rate fighter more obsessed with the latest iteration of its autonomous nipple physics than with actually being fun to do, as attested to by the interesting language my upstairs neighbors’ child picked up through my ceiling when I was trying to just clear the game in single player with all the characters.
So I don’t like him, but he does have the occasional good idea. I sincerely hope that he lands somewhere where he can make a difference without ever being allowed to speak to anybody with a camera, microphone, or notebook. He makes a good case for himself as a Microsoft fanboy - maybe MGS? Just somewhere where a producer with an iron fist can keep him firmly in his place and focus him on the parts of his games that he does well. And never let him speak to the public. Seriously. I can’t bring myself to make an argument that a game could ever possibly be considered art because this guy is out pretending to be a rock star and generally making an ass out of himself, and, by proxy, one of my favorite hobbies.
Meh. I’ll give him props for Ninja Gaiden (if the genius doesn’t instead lay with someone else on the team instead), but the rest of his games are mediocre to bad.
As far as backing up his word, my favorite quote of his was something along the lines of, “I’m not sure when I’ll reveal Ninja Gaiden 2, but when I do, it will make all other action game designers lose all motivation.”
And then it turns out that NGII is just a prettier, bloodier NG with some dismemberment and a slightly changed health scheme…
But how much of his smack talk is real and how much is just him talking smack for kicks? I also wonder how much of it is just being translated to English with the wrong tone. Any of our Asian brethren here have an opinion on that?
The guy wears sunglasses indoors… at night.
I don’t think they’re translating him wrong.