Did the devil do him in?
Tomonobu Itagakigot his start at Tecmo back in 1992 working as a graphics programmer onTecmo Super Bowlfor the SNES. It was a fitting start for a man whose career would be largely defined by creating games that fuse Japanese-born passions with Western-style machismo for a global audience.
His latest game,Devil’s Third, is probably the greatest example of that combination to date. It starts with a hugely muscular shirtless Caucasian man, covered in Sanskrit tattoos, performing a virtuoso rock drum solo in the basement of Guantanamo Bay. It’s a scene that would be right at home onWWE Smackdownor one of Canon’s schlock-classicAmerican Ninjafilms. Ten years ago, the video game industry was littered with this kind of fun. These days, not so much.
I went to one Best Buy and three GameStop locations before I found a retail copy ofDevil’s Thirdfor sale. Best Buy had none in stock for the entire district, and only three GameStop stores in the state had copies ofDevil’s Thirdavailable for customers who hadn’t placed a pre-order. GameStop also let me know that, as far as it could tell, its online store only had 420 copies of the game available for sale for the entire country. Unless demand picks up and Nintendo of America issues a reprint,Devil’s Thirdmay end up being one of the more rare games the publisher has ever released.
This leaves me wondering what’s next for Itagaki. Development ofDevil’s Thirdreportedly started back in 2008. After seven years of development, and what’s shaping up to be a critical and commercial disaster, it’s hard to imagine any AAA publishers will have much faith in him now. That said, Shinji Mikami managed to getThe Evil Withinproduced even after relatively poor sales on bothVanquishandShadows of the Damned,so there is some precedent for a legendary Japanese game designer surviving a few high-profile flops.
There’s also a chance that Valhalla Games, Itagaki’s current studio, will be acquired by some massive mobile game publisher. That’s what happened to Grasshopper Manufacture after it released a few less-than-huge games, though it’s hard to say if that was a good thing for Suda 51 fans. Outside of a small contribution totheShort Peaceproject, Grasshopper hasn’t released anything on consoles since it was sold to GungHo in 2013.
Itagaki could also turn to Kickstarter, which worked wonders for formerMega Manhoncho Keiji Inafune andCastlevaniaboss Koji Igarashi, though that wouldn’t come cheap. If he were to continue with the kind of visually rich 3D character action games he’s known for, he’d likely need to do as well if not better thanYu Suzuki’sShenmue 3campaign, which still needed additional financial help from Sony even after raising $6 million through crowdfunding. It’s hard to imagine that Itagaki could inspire $6 million in faith and goodwill from his fans at this point, though I also would have never guessed that Alanis Morissette’s “You Oughta Know” would turn out to be a hit, so I may not be the best judge of what the public will swoon over.
Thanks in part to the lowered expectations set byChris Carter’s review of the game, I’ve had a good time withDevil’s Thirdso far, and I hope it’s not the last we see of Itagaki’s particular brand of testosterone-drunk entertainment. I’m just not sure my hopes are realistic. It could be the kind of games Itagaki built his career on no longer have a place in AAA gaming.
