The passing of Tomonobu Itagaki marks the end of an era

Industry legend Tomonobu Itagaki died early this month. His cause of death hasn’t been formally disclosed, but prior to his passing, he was fairly transparent about having health issues to the degree that might require hospitalization. It could be the last time that the storied developer made headlines, but it was far from the first. His public rivalry with Tekken producer Katsuhiro Harada, the sexual harassment charges (that he was later found innocent on) that were levied against him in the mid-2000s, and his own lawsuit against his former employers at Koei Tecmo for withholding dividends for his work were all front-page news over the past decades. Some saw Itagaki as the villain of these stories, while others identified with him, and cheered him on up until the very end. As such, the news of his passing was also mixed, with the industry as a whole looking unsure of how to respond.

Personally, I am not sure I would have liked Itagaki personally. I’m not sure he was always a great person. But I value his work, and I’m sad that the kind of games he championed may not outlive him.

Having cut his teeth in game development in the days of the NES, Japanese Law School Graduate and habitual sunglasses wearer Tomonobu Itagaki will be remembered in equal measure for his massive successes and his colossal failures. For my money, it’s his failures that are the most telling about who he was as a person, and as a creative force in this industry. But we’ll get to that later.

COOL IS DEAD, LONG LIVE COOL

First, a brief introduction on Itagaki’s career and gameography. He spent the majority of his career at Tecmo, initially under the tutelage of genre innovators like Yoshiaki Inose (Ninja Gaiden, Rygar) and Akihiko Shimoji (Tecmo Bowl). Some of his earliest titles were sports games, like Tecmo Super Bowl for the SNES, and Captain Tsubasa 4, a soccer game for the Super Famicom. Designing games that pushed the limits of how far games could go in recreating real experiences like kicking a ball (or later, kicking people in the face) was hard baked into his understanding of what making vital, relevant games was. Appealing to international audiences with cool, universally appealing themes and characters was also key to his philosophy on effective game development.

Ultimately though, his main role in the history of game design was to find ways to effectively compete, and even defeat, competing developers. His Dead or Alive series was created specifically to compete with Sega’s Virtua Fighter franchise, before later going head-to-head with the Tekken series. Later, his reboot of the Ninja Gaiden series came to represent the original Xbox console, being one of its few Japanese developed exclusives. The series was so respected that it managed to help the fledging system to compete head-to-head with the PS2 and its popular character action exclusives like the Devil May Cry series.

So when you needed a guy to make a game that was physically gratifying to play, that punched you right in the gut with questionably tacky, over the top sexiness and violence, and was willing to be David to the Goliaths at Sony, Capcom, and other industry powerhouses, Itagaki was your guy. This was true up until the very end of his career, when his final game, Devil’s Third, stood out as one of the Nintendo Wii U’s last hard-boiled M rated action games. Like Itagaki himself, the game had the odds stacked against it, but refused to go down without a fight, always staying true to its core principles, despite everything.

HEAVY METAL MASCULINITY

That’s why Devil’s Third is easily my favorite game that Itagaki ever produced. Technically, it’s got plenty of issues, but in terms of personality, it’s positively overflowing with Itagaki’s personal idiosyncrasies, offering an undistilled dose of his particular brand of sweaty, heavy metal masculinity. It’s also the broadest game in his portfolio of work, functioning as both a cover shooter and melee brawler, with in-depth single-player narrative and a widely varied online mode. In a lot of ways, it works as a summation of everything that defined him as an artist. Ivan, the game’s lead, holding both a US developed machine gun and a Japanese katana, marries eastern and western traditions of violence under one ridiculously muscled, thoroughly tattooed body. Like Itagaki, he always wears sunglasses.

That’s true even in prison, where Ivan is set up in the basement, starting the game off with a massive drum solo. While it’s unlikely that Itagaki meant the game to be at all autobiographical, I can’t help but wonder if he also felt like he was seen as a criminal or felt imprisoned in his own way. He was a heavy smoker and drinker, with secondhand reports stating that his use of substances likely contributed to his health issues. And by the time Devil’s Third released, he was seen as an outcast in the industry, his history of lawsuits and fractured professional relationships hanging over him like a long shadow. That’s undoubtedly part of the reason that Devil’s Third was trapped in development hell for over a decade. But Itagaki refuses to stop banging away at getting it down, eventually seeing it published by Nintendo, who essentially released it to die during the tail end of the Wii U’s lifespan.

I bought the game at launch, unsure of what I’d get. Withing minutes, I was breaking out of prison, cutting down swarms of bats with the previously mentioned katana, beating the crap out of needlessly aggressive strangers, and at the end of the first stage, shooting a massively muscular inmate boss in the face as he tossed insults and Molotov cocktails my way in equal measure.

Did I mention that the name of the boss was also Molotov? If there was ever any question of Itagaki’s lack of subtlety, Devil’s Third answers the question with blood sprays, f-bombs, and at the end of each level, a muscular man, a voluptuous woman, or maybe a bloated zombie with a jetpack, all trying to kill you.

FREE IVAN

Among other things, Devil’s Third sits at the crossroads between a time when games worked on their own specific, classic logic, with health bars, unexplainably durable enemies who can be shot in the face without falling down, and the promise of a big, predictable one-on-one battle at the end of every level. But it also wants to be like a traditional action movie, with political intrigue, heroes with a tragic past, and eventually, a fleet of World War 2 aircraft bombing beyond enemy lines.  Unlike the games of Suda51 or Hideo Kojima, the game never overtly tries to be high-minded or symbolic of anything in particular. It’s totally irony free, and blazingly excited to be what it is. In that way, it’s a better game about the awkward teenage years of the medium than most titles that attempt to take on the topic head on. Devil’s Third smokes in the bathroom, has a soft, weak mustache that it’s incredibly proud of, and it doesn’t always remember to wear deodorant. And it absolutely means it when it says that it doesn’t give a fuck if it gets bad grades, which it absolutely did upon release. 

For that reason, and multiple others, it will probably remain landlocked on the Wii U for the foreseeable future. And that’s a shame. If re-released as a Switch 2 exclusive, promoted as the last game from industry legend Tomonobu Itagaki, with the online modes reinstated, and marketed with the understanding that tonally, it often veers into “so-bad-its-funny” territory while still working as a solid, and at times brilliant, hybrid melee/shooter character action game. 

After that, put Ivan in Smash, realistically, as an assist trophy. And let him do that iconic drum solo as an attack. He’s the first, last, and likely only lead in a Nintendo published title to be able to kick the double bass drums with a technical skill and emotional fervor that rivals anything from Lars Ulrich from Metallica or Dave Lombardo from Slayer. Itagaki may be gone, but if the evolution of games is to be fully understood, his cold faced heroes, hot power fantasies, and urge to make players say, “God damn, that guy really knows how to rock,” must be remembered.