1UP recently posted an interview with Tomonobu Itagaki of Dead or Alive and Ninja Gaiden fame, republished from the September 2008 EGM released last month. The sit down with Itagaki, which suitably occurred at a bar, is more than worth a look owing that it’s the first interview with the game designer since he walked away from Tecmo…. and the fact that Itagaki lets drop that he’s drunk.

When asked about the declining state of Japanese game development and the fact that a large portion of developers are forced to churn out either 2D titles or downloadable content, Itagaki replies thusly:

[….] I’m kind of drunk right now, so I’ll speak my mind, but I think that the overall theme is just kind of the passage of time, right? As time passes, things change. Obviously, there’s a lot of times to why that happened. Yeah, I think I’ll be speaking a lot in metaphors. I hope you don’t mind that.

You look at, for instance, back in World War II. You had aerial dogfight battle with 600 planes on each side. And then, as we got into say the Korean War, and now it’s say maybe 50 or 60. And in modern times, with modern jet planes, you only need one or two to fight a battle. So you certainly see a progression like that. So, I do look on it as someone who likes fighter planes and thinks that they’re really cool. The fact that fighter planes themselves have dwindled in number is certainly something that is somewhat regretful. But I still like fighter planes, and I think they’re the coolest type of plane there is

One thing I will say is that, definitely, you have to have at least some fighter planes. Any country that doesn’t have fighter planes is destined to be extinct. In that metaphor, I think that game companies that aren’t able to do high-end development, or don’t have developers who can work on high-end hardware are destined to ultimately be obsolete in the market. Make sense?

Itagaki of course offers up some more well reasoned responses, so the article is informative, too…. but the fighter plane analogy comes up more than once. Or twice.

For the full interview with the inebriated developer, click here.

Source: 1UP

The Toronto chapter of the International Game Developers Association held a panel on game journalism last week, featuring five veteran journalists from Canada. One of the panelists, Jason MacIsaac, put together a summary for the IGDA website.

“The consensus was that Game Journalism could use some more of the discipline and ethics seen in the older and more established fields of reporting and reviewing,” Jason writes. Given the audience, reviews were a focal point for the discussion, including the criteria journalists use in reviewing games.
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