Report: Tecmo Veteran Itagaki Founds New Game Studio

Following an amicable settlement with former employer Tecmo, game designer Tomonobu Itagaki (Ninja Gaiden, Dead or Alive) has confirmed the founding of a new development house, Valhalla Game Studios. Last year, Itagaki revealed he was establishing a studio called Tokyo Vikings, but clarified that the moniker was only tentative. According to a 1UP report translating an article published by Famitsu magazine, Valhalla is already staffed up to 50 developers, with the potential for slight further expansion. "It's not going to be a 100-person company," Itagaki said. "Fifty people working for two years can produce something better than 100 people working for one year." Itagaki hopes Valhalla will provide him with creative opportunities that are becoming increasingly difficult to exercise in Japan's more established game industry. He said in two decades of making games, only two or three times has he managed to produce titles that were simultaneously critically successful, commercially successful, and fan hits. "The Japanese industry has made achieving that all but impossible these days," he explained. "There's an equation you can use to satisfy all three groups, but once money enters the picture, you start neglecting the things that're most important and the equation winds up unsolvable. My friends and I went independent because we were wasting our time wrangling with issues like that." The company's official site is now live.