Banobu Itagaki made the biggest typo of my career when I described him as the director of Ninja Garden. This Japanese designer emerged with the original Xbox hardware and led Team Ninja, the team that created the "Dead or Alive" series and the "Ninja Gaiden" series.

In 2008, Itagaki and Tecmo fell out quite spectacularly, leading to various accusations and lawsuits (settled in 2010). He then co-founded Valhalla Game Studios with other former Team Ninja members, including Satoshi Kanematsu, and embarked on the development of "Devil's Third," a Wii U exclusive game that met an unfortunate end.

After "Devil's Third" received unfavorable reviews, Itagaki was somewhat silent, but recently posted an unused interview on Facebook. In it, he details his recent situation, future prospects, and hilarious episodes about his early Xbox days. 5]

When asked about his recent situation, Itagaki wrote, "For the past four years I've been teaching work to train younger people, but now I want to make games again, and I just started a company to do so. ." he wrote

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He is clearly pushing Microsoft to sign on to his new venture. Twenty years [since the original Xbox] have passed, and I've established my own company, Itagaki Games, which is neither Tecmo nor Valhalla." I know Microsoft is still very active. If they would reach out to me, it would be an honor for me.

You might wonder what this will do to Valhalla Game Studios. Its Japanese website was last updated in 2018, and its international domain has expired. Its last games were released in 2016: Devil's Third Online, a Japan-only PC version of the Devil's Third multiplayer, and a Nintendo DS game.

The full interview is worth a read for Itagaki fans, detailing the reasons for DoA3's infamous bargain-basement cuts, his relationship with Microsoft, and a mention of the great Xbox firebrand Seamus Blackley.

In a representative episode, here is how Blackley communicated the hardware issues that needed to be addressed. It was two weeks before the mastering of Dead or Alive 3. Seamus called me out of the blue and told me, as usual, to come with him because he had a machine gun in each hand and we were going to go attack Nvidia right now, and we didn't have time for that because we were busy finishing DOA 3." [Then he said that Nvidia promised us that the GPU they would provide us would be 250 MHz, but they just called and said it would be a 10% drop from there. That is not what we agreed to. Then I said, calm down, Seamus, I think what we need is for the game to run at 225 MHz. Very Seamus, nothing exciting or fun if all he did was apologize and say that the GPU clocks are going to be 10% lower. But he's really good at making noise and putting people through their paces, and if you notice, he gets other people to work for him to accomplish what he wants. He's really good at that."

Nvidia was lucky to get away with it. If Microsoft took Itagaki's heavy hint, you can read about it here.