Tomonobu Itagaki returns with new team, new game, same badass attitude

by David Hinkle on May 27th 2009 1:15PM

During a recent interview with 1UP, ex-Tecmo employee and leather lover Tomonobu Itagaki (along with comrades Hiroaki Matsui, Katsunori Ehara, and Yoshifuru Okamoto) iterated that he is returning to gaming, and will be backed up by a brand new team on a project for a future game. Unfortunately, we won't see anything on this new game at next week's E3, although Itagaki did confirm he would be in attendance.

The new company is tentatively called "Tokyo Vikings" (how ... appropriate) and is largely comprised of ex-Team Ninja staff, including a majority of the folks who worked on Ninja Gaiden 2. Surprisingly, his new team even managed to snag some key character designers from Virtua Fighter 5.

Itagaki was overall pretty tight-lipped about the new team and its mystery project, but did confirm that it wouldn't be a fighting game, as Itagaki is sure he's hit the ceiling there with Dead or Alive 4. He wouldn't comment on whether it would be an Xbox 360 exclusive, or heading to other consoles such as the PS3, but his past affiliations with Microsoft might suggest a likely path for his future games.

Source

Tags: hiroaki-matsui, japan, katsunori-ehara, koei, ninja-gaiden-2, team-ninja, tecmo, tecmo-koei, tokyo-vikings, tomonobu-itagaki, virtua-fighter-5, yoshifuru-okamoto

Reader Comments (53)

same bad skin

I think I figured out the game he's making!

Look in the background, what do you see?
A bottle of booze
A 360
Ryu Hayabusa
A set of swords
And Master Chief.

Ryu and Master C are drinking in a pub one day, drunk off their arses when they look at each other. Master C. flicks Ryu off, burps, and falls over, Ryu blinks, and falls over as well.
The next day they wake up in a room covered in blood with a sword in each hand and their pants/tights/pantaloons missing. In order to find out what happened in their drunken stupor, they travel around, slicing up Covenants, Fiends, and Fievanats (covenants and fiends mated... -shudder-) in brutal, co-op possible action. C'mon, I'm sure you've wanted to see what that power armor could do with a sword and you know it.