Xbox 360

Itagaki speaks, announces Valhalla Game Studios

Tomonobu Itagaki, the man who created the Dead or Alive, left Tecmo almost two years ago. We’ve only heard little from him since. We knew he’s working on a new Xbox 360 game, which is just about it.

“It’s already been two years? I haven’t been playing around or anything,” he told the latest issue of Famitsu. “I’ve been working on new game concepts, taking photographs, building model-train layouts, all sorts of things. I just figured it was about time I got back to games, my main line of work.”

In the interview, he reveals the name of his newly formed development studio.

Valhalla Game Studios is the name, where Itagaki is in charge of the development and game design. Former Tecmo guy Satoshi Kanematsu is in charge.

“Valhalla is about 50 people right now,” Itagaki told Famitsu. “That may expand a bit, but it’s not going to be a 100-person company. 50 people working for two years can produce something better than 100 people working for one year. 100 times 1 and 50 times 2 may produce the same number, but not in creative businesses like this one. I know nobody means any harm by it, but publicly-traded companies have to prove their worth to the stock market on a year-by-year basis, and that means they can’t focus all-out on quality. We’re creators here; we like making things more than doing math.”

Itagaki wouldn’t reveal just what it is he’s working on and what other platform(s) it’ll be out for (if any), but he says it sure won’t be another fighting game.

“I already made Dead or Alive, the best fighting game in the world, in my last company,” the ever-modest Itagaki commented. “Trying to compete against my own daughter wouldn’t be worth the fight. Fighting games are kind of at another dead end right now, but you could say the genre would’ve died ages ago if DOA wasn’t around. We saw ourselves as a counterbalance to the fighting-game norm back then, and without that sort of presence in the genre, it’s just going to keep shrinking in size. Someone needs to step up and change things.”

Thanks, 1UP.