Team Ninja | Code Like It's 198x

By the mid-1990s Tecmo, the company behind Bomb Jack and Ninja Gaiden, was struggling. Wireframe’s history of the company says it “had begun to flag financially”, and that its recovery came from a new design group headed by Tomonobu Itagaki, “handed the task of making a rival to Sega’s Virtua Fighter”. The group called itself Team Ninja. Its Dead or Alive “helped pull Tecmo back from the financial brink”. Ten years later the same team brought back Ryu Hayabusa in a Ninja Gaiden so hard that Edge warned many players would meet “an impassable difficulty spike” at the first boss. Team Ninja carried on after Itagaki left in 2008, and after Tecmo itself was absorbed into Koei Tecmo in 2010.

Fast facts

Formed: 1995, inside Tecmo, Tokyo.
Led by: Tomonobu Itagaki until 2008; then Yosuke Hayashi.
Known for: Dead or Alive (1996 onwards), Ninja Gaiden (2004 onwards), Metroid: Other M (2010, with Nintendo), Nioh (2017).
Owner since 2010: Koei Tecmo, after Koei absorbed Tecmo.

Dead or Alive

Dead or Alive reached the arcades in November 1996 on Sega’s own Model 2 board, which Sega had licensed to Tecmo. Itagaki replaced the usual guard button with a Hold button that caught an incoming attack and turned it into a counter, because, as Computer and Video Games reported, he wanted “to recreate the thrill of a Kung-Fu movie, where you see fighters repeatedly countering hundreds of moves”. Edge gave the Saturn version eight out of ten in 1997, and the PlayStation version followed in 1998.

The series followed Sega’s hardware and then Microsoft’s. Dead or Alive 2 ran on Sega’s NAOMI board and the Dreamcast, and was later ported to the PlayStation 2. Dead or Alive 3 was one of the Xbox’s launch games in America in November 2001. Itagaki told the Official Xbox Magazine that this time “we really wanted to make it easier and more accessible to casual players”, and the magazine found that “Itagaki’s claim that it was both easy and deep holds true”. Dead or Alive 4 followed on the Xbox 360.

The fighting was only part of how the series was seen. Magazines remarked on the women fighters’ figures from the start, and Dead or Alive Xtreme Beach Volleyball (2003) took them on a bikini holiday. Edge’s review asked whether it was “intended to titillate, and does it objectify women in a potentially damaging way?” The Dead or Alive entry follows that criticism through the series.

Ninja Gaiden

Team Ninja started work on a new Ninja Gaiden in 1999, at first on the NAOMI board. Itagaki told Edge in 2002 that it was “made very much for the west. It is quite hard, with many functions and a higher level of difficulty.” It came out on the Xbox in 2004 and Edge gave it nine out of ten. Ninja Gaiden 2, published by Microsoft as an Xbox 360 exclusive, followed in 2008. Yosuke Hayashi, who had worked on the 2004 game, directed Ninja Gaiden: Dragon Sword for the Nintendo DS and Ninja Gaiden Sigma, the PlayStation 3 remake of 2007.

After Itagaki

Itagaki left Tecmo in 2008 and sued it for unpaid bonuses connected with Dead or Alive 4; the two sides settled in 2010, and Itagaki went on to head development at a new company, Valhalla Game Studios. He died in October 2025. Hayashi took charge of Team Ninja. Edge reported in 2014 that he then led development on Metroid: Other M, Ninja Gaiden 3 and Dead or Alive 5.

Metroid: Other M (2010) was a collaboration with Nintendo for the Wii on its Metroid series. Edge noted the change of direction: after the first-person Metroid Prime games, production had passed to Team Ninja and the series had become “a 2.5D shooting brawler”. Its review asked “which Team Ninja is going to turn up? The fine-tuning master of virtual combat, the crummy level designer or the clown behind lascivious minigame collections?”, and answered that it was the first: Samus could now dodge an attack at the last moment and charge her shots faster for it.

Ninja Gaiden 3 (2012), the series’ “first Itagaki-free series entry” in Edge‘s words, went the other way. It tried to widen the audience and lost the old one. Hayashi told Edge in 2014: “We knew that we should try to get new fans into the series who hadn’t played it before, so we tried some different takes on previous Ninja Gaiden action … I think we were not able to give the core fans the experience they expected.” The revised Ninja Gaiden 3: Razor’s Edge put those lessons back in. Dead or Alive 5 (2012) had stages that broke apart during fights, and Hayashi said its women would be drawn more realistically than the earlier games’ “pin-up images”.

Nioh and later

Nioh had been announced by Koei in 2005, before Koei and Tecmo merged. After the merger Team Ninja was brought in to help, and later given the go-ahead to lead it. By then, Wireframe noted in its history of the game, the challenging action-RPGs of FromSoftware’s Souls series had become mainstream, and the game, co-directed by Fumihiko Yasuda, was built in their shadow. Nioh came out on the PlayStation 4 in 2017, a samurai action game set in Japan’s Sengoku period, and Nioh 2 followed in 2020.

The studio also took on other companies’ characters. Marvel Ultimate Alliance 3 (2019), published by Nintendo for the Switch, drew 68% from Wireframe, which found that “new developer Team Ninja does well to replicate the button-mashing gratification of prior entries”. Dead or Alive 6 (2019) scored 62% in the same magazine. Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty, an action-RPG in the vein of Nioh, was on Wireframe’s list of games to watch at the end of 2022. Ninja Gaiden 4, made with PlatinumGames, was released on 21 October 2025.

Sources

“Developer Profile: Tecmo”, Wireframe issue 35, March 2020, pp. 50–53: Tecmo’s mid-1990s troubles; the founding of Team Ninja under Itagaki and its Virtua Fighter brief; Dead or Alive and Tecmo’s recovery.
Edge issue 31, April 1996: Sega’s licensing of Model 2 to Tecmo. Edge issue 53, Christmas 1997: Dead or Alive (Saturn), eight out of ten.
Computer and Video Games issue 199, June 1998, pp. 30–33: Dead or Alive (the Hold button and the Kung-Fu film quote).
Official Xbox Magazine (US) issue 1, December 2001: Dead or Alive 3 review and Itagaki interview.
Hyper (Australia) issue 142, August 2005, p. 38: Team Ninja’s Dead or Alive 4 for the Xbox 360.
Edge issue 113, August 2002, “Inside… Tecmo”: Itagaki on the new Ninja Gaiden (work since 1999 on NAOMI; “made very much for the west”).
Edge issue 121, March 2003: Dead or Alive Xtreme Beach Volleyball review.
Edge issue 135, April 2004: Ninja Gaiden (Xbox) review, nine out of ten.
Edge issue 182, December 2007, pp. 27–28: Ninja Gaiden 2 preview (Xbox 360, Microsoft, 2008).
Edge issue 213, April 2010, pp. 13 and 25: Itagaki’s settlement with Tecmo and Valhalla Game Studios; Metroid: Other M handed to Team Ninja.
Edge issue 219, October 2010, pp. 86–87: Metroid: Other M review (Nintendo/Team Ninja).
Edge issue 238, March 2012: Ninja Gaiden 3 preview (“first Itagaki-free series entry”). Edge issue 239, April 2012, pp. 56–58: Dead or Alive 5 and Yosuke Hayashi.
Edge issue 263, February 2014, p. 73: Yosuke Hayashi and Keiji Inafune interview (Hayashi’s career; Ninja Gaiden 3 and Razor’s Edge).
Wireframe issue 31, January 2020, p. 21: Nioh (2017, Team Ninja, PS4). Wireframe issue 48, February 2021, pp. 38–41: the making of Nioh and Nioh 2 (Koei’s 2005 announcement; Fumihiko Yasuda; the Souls influence).
Wireframe issue 20, August 2019, p. 63: Marvel Ultimate Alliance 3 review (Team Ninja, Nintendo; 68%).
Wireframe issue 12, April 2019, p. 60: Dead or Alive 6 review (62%).
Wireframe issue 69, December 2022, p. 25: Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty.
Brian Ashcraft, “Itagaki And Tecmo Settle Legal Brouhaha”, Kotaku, 26 February 2010 (web, secondary): the lawsuit and settlement. https://kotaku.com/itagaki-and-tecmo-settle-legal-brouhaha-5480807
TJ Denzer, “Ninja Gaiden 4 gets October 2025 release date”, Shacknews, 19 August 2025 (web, secondary). https://www.shacknews.com/article/145570/ninja-gaiden-4-release-date
Wikipedia, “Tomonobu Itagaki” (web, secondary), citing Wesley Yin-Poole’s obituary for IGN, 16 October 2025: Itagaki’s death. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tomonobu_Itagaki
Wikipedia, “Team Ninja” (web, secondary), citing Tecmo’s 2006 business report, and Sega Retro, “Team Ninja” (web, secondary): founded in 1995.