Tecmo

Many of Tecmo’s best-known games were hard. Bomb Jack asked for perfect jumps, Ninja Gaiden on the NES killed its players over and over and told its story in film-like cut-scenes between the deaths, and Dead or Alive built a fighting game around reading an opponent’s attack and turning it back on them. The company that made them started out far from games: Wireframe’s history of Tecmo lists cleaning equipment and yacht sales among its early lines of business, and its games first went out under another name, Tehkan.

Fast facts

Founded: July 1967, as Nihon Yacht; Yoshihito Kakihara was its co-founder and president.
Names: Tehkan for its early arcade games; Tecmo from January 1986.
First arcade game of its own: Pleiads (1981).
Known for: Star Force and Bomb Jack (1984), Tehkan World Cup (1985), Solomon’s Key and Rygar (1986), Tecmo Bowl, Ninja Gaiden, Dead or Alive (1996), Monster Rancher, Fatal Frame.
Studio: Team Ninja, led by Tomonobu Itagaki until 2008.
Ended: joined Koei under Koei Tecmo Holdings in April 2009; Koei absorbed Tecmo in April 2010 to form Koei Tecmo Games.

Tehkan in the arcades

Tehkan’s first arcade game developed in-house, Pleiads (1981), was a Galaxian-style shooter that Wireframe called “fairly unremarkable”. In America its early games went out through other companies: Video Games magazine reviewed Guzzler in 1983 as a “licensed conversion kit from Tehkan, Ltd.” sold by Centuri, and at the AMOA trade show that winter found Tehkan in “a little spot” with its tank game Senjyo, predicting that if the game crossed the Pacific it would carry “a different name and … a different manufacturer”.

The games that made the name came in 1984 and 1985. Much of the talent, Wireframe reports, came from the rival developer Universal: Kazutoshi Ueda, who oversaw Bomb Jack, had designed Universal’s Mr. Do!, and around twenty former Universal staff followed him, perhaps half of Tehkan’s development workforce. Michishito Ishizuka, who programmed Tehkan World Cup, remembered a saying among the staff: “If you didn’t come from Universal, then you can’t get promoted here.” Small teams, the magazine says, turned games round in a few months.

Star Force (1984) was a vertically scrolling shooter. Hudson Soft converted it for the Famicom and made it the first game of its touring Caravan tournaments, then built its own Star Soldier series on it.
Bomb Jack (1984) sent a caped hero leaping and gliding round a single screen to collect bombs, scoring more for taking the bombs with lit fuses in order. CRASH reported that it reached the arcades “around Easter 1984” and “although it didn’t become a massive success, the game attracted a cult following”. Elite Systems’ home versions made it familiar in Britain.
Tehkan World Cup (1985) was an overhead football game played with trackballs. Sensible Software’s Jon Hare told Retro Gamer that he and Chris Yates were addicted to it (“A game that hurt if you wore a ring on your hand”), and that it led to their MicroProse Soccer and, later, Sensible Soccer.

Tehkan became Tecmo on 8 January 1986, and that April released its first game for a home console, Mighty Bomb Jack for the Famicom. The corporate history behind the name is tangled. Japanese company histories trace the Tehkan name to a building-maintenance firm founded in 1964, which became Tehkan in 1977 and Tecmo in 1986; in April 1987 a related company, Tehkan Electronics, which had been founded in July 1967 as Nihon Yacht, merged with Tecmo and took its name. Koei Tecmo counts Tecmo’s history from that 1967 company. The arcade games kept coming under the new name. Solomon’s Key (1986) was a puzzle game in which the hero makes and destroys blocks to build platforms and open paths, and collects keys to unlock doors; US Gold sold it on the Spectrum, Commodore 64, Amstrad and Atari ST, quoting Computer and Video Games: “An arcade strategy game with enough addictive qualities to turn even the toughest coin-op critic into an arcade junky”. Rygar (1986) was a run-and-gun arcade game whose hero’s weapon is, in Wireframe’s words, “a giant, deadly yo-yo”; its NES version added more weapons and exploration.

Ninja Gaiden and Tecmo Bowl

Tecmo’s biggest successes of the late 1980s came on the NES. Wireframe tells how Ninja Gaiden started: Kakihara saw the ninja craze in America and set two teams to work on different games with the same name. The arcade game was a scrolling fighting game in the style of Double Dragon, released in Europe as Shadow Warriors, in which the ninja could swing from poles and ledges to kick his enemies. The NES game shared little but the hero. It was a platform game in which Ryu Hayabusa clings to walls and springs between them, and between its levels the story of his father’s death is told in what Tecmo called “Cinema Display” scenes. Nintendo Power previewed it in early 1989 saying it “got the highest marks of any title we’ve seen in a long time”.

Tecmo Bowl began as an arcade game; Nintendo Power, awaiting the NES conversion in 1988, said “the arcade version is really great”. Both NES games came out in America early in 1989. Tecmo Super Bowl (1991) featured all 28 NFL teams, and Wireframe noted that players still arranged and streamed Tecmo Super Bowl tournaments almost 30 years later.

Team Ninja and Dead or Alive

By the mid-1990s, Wireframe writes, Tecmo “had begun to flag financially”. Its recovery came from Team Ninja, a design group led by Tomonobu Itagaki and given the job of making a rival to Sega’s Virtua Fighter. The result, Dead or Alive, ran on Sega’s own Model 2 arcade board: Edge reported from the AOU arcade show in 1996 that Sega’s licensing of Model 2 to Tecmo and Jaleco let it move its best work on to Model 3. The arcade game came out in November 1996. Its central idea was the hold. Computer and Video Games explained in 1998 that Itagaki had replaced the usual guard button with “One button, ‘Hold’”: blocking was done by pulling away from the opponent, and the hold button caught an attack and turned it into a counter, because Itagaki 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 wrote that its “hi-res, 60fps visuals will both delight and astound Saturn owners”, but found its arenas disappointing. Dead or Alive 2 followed on Sega’s NAOMI board and the Dreamcast.

Tecmo had other hits on the PlayStation. Monster Rancher (1997) raised monsters from whatever audio CD the player put in the drive; its advertisement promised “EVERY CD YOU OWN CONTAINS A MONSTER”. Fatal Frame (2001), Project Zero in Europe, armed the heroine of a ghost story with only a camera; see survival horror. In 2004 Team Ninja brought back Ryu Hayabusa in a 3D Ninja Gaiden for Microsoft’s Xbox, which Itagaki had shown to an enthusiastic crowd at Microsoft’s X03 event in 2003.

Koei Tecmo

The founder, Kakihara, died in 2006. In 2008 Itagaki left Tecmo and sued the company for 148 million yen in unpaid bonuses; the two sides settled in 2010. Itagaki died in October 2025, aged 58. In August 2008 Square Enix proposed a friendly takeover of Tecmo, which Tecmo’s board turned down in September in favour of talks with another Japanese publisher, Koei. The two companies signed an integration agreement in November 2008, set up a joint holding company, Koei Tecmo Holdings, on 1 April 2009, and on 1 April 2010 merged their game companies: Koei absorbed Tecmo, and the combined company became Koei Tecmo Games.

Team Ninja and Tecmo’s series carried on inside it. Ninja Gaiden 3 (2012) was, Edge noted, the series’ first “Itagaki-free” entry. Dead or Alive 6 (2019), published under the Koei Tecmo name, drew 62 per cent from Wireframe. Team Ninja also made Nioh, a game Koei had first announced in 2005, and Ninja Gaiden 4, made with PlatinumGames, was released on 21 October 2025. Koei Tecmo marked Tecmo’s 50th anniversary in 2017.

Sources

Koei Tecmo Holdings, “コーエーテクモの歴史” (Koei Tecmo history) and “沿革” (corporate history) (web, secondary): Nihon Yacht founded in July 1967; the change of name to Tecmo in January 1986; Mighty Bomb Jack in April 1986; Tecmo Bowl and Ninja Gaiden in America in February 1989; Dead or Alive in the arcades in November 1996; the 2008 integration agreement with Koei, the 2009 holding company and the 2010 reorganisation; Tecmo’s 50th anniversary in 2017. https://www.koeitecmo.co.jp/recruit/company/history/ and https://www.koeitecmo.co.jp/company/history/
Wikipedia (Japanese), “テクモ” (web, secondary): the building-maintenance company of 1964 and its renaming as Tehkan in 1977 and Tecmo on 8 January 1986; Nihon Yacht (July 1967), renamed Tehkan Electronics in 1982, which merged with Tecmo and took its name on 1 April 1987; Kakihara’s death in 2006; Itagaki’s lawsuit of May 2008; the rejection of Square Enix’s bid; Koei Tecmo Holdings on 1 April 2009 and the merger of 1 April 2010, in which Koei was the surviving company. https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/テクモ
“Developer Profile: Tecmo”, Wireframe issue 35, March 2020, pp. 50–53: Kakihara and Tehkan in 1967; cleaning equipment and yacht sales; Pleiads; Ueda, Ishizuka and the Universal staff; the two Ninja Gaiden games; the mid-1990s troubles and Team Ninja; Tecmo Super Bowl’s 28 teams and its tournaments; Kakihara’s death and Itagaki’s lawsuit.
Video Games (US), October 1983, p. 50: Guzzler “licensed conversion kit from Tehkan, Ltd.” (Centuri). February 1984, p. 50: “Tehkan’s Senjyo” at the AMOA show.
CRASH issue 26, March 1986: Bomb Jack in the arcades “around Easter 1984” and its cult following.
Next issue 10, October 2025: Bomb Jack retrospective (Tehkan, 1984; lit bombs collected in order).
Retro Gamer issue 43, 2007: “The making of Sensible Soccer” (Jon Hare on Tehkan World Cup). Issue 104, July 2012: Tehkan World Cup as the inspiration for MicroProse Soccer.
Your Sinclair issue 21, 1987: US Gold’s Solomon’s Key advertisement, with its C+VG quotation and formats.
Computer and Video Games issue 88, February 1989: Shadow Warriors (the Ninja Gaiden coin-op) preview.
Nintendo Power issue 2, September–October 1988: Tecmo Bowl (“the arcade version is really great”). Issue 4, January–February 1989: Ninja Gaiden preview (“the highest marks of any title we’ve seen in a long time”; Cinema Display). Issue 5, March–April 1989: Ninja Gaiden feature.
Computer and Video Games issue 199, June 1998: Dead or Alive feature (Itagaki, the Hold button, the Kung-Fu film quote).
Edge issue 31, April 1996: AOU show report (Model 2 licensed to Tecmo and Jaleco; Dead or Alive).
Dead or Alive Saturn review, Edge issue 53, Christmas 1997: eight out of ten.
Official US PlayStation Magazine issue 1, October 1997: Monster Rancher advertisement.
Edge issue 130, December 2003: X03 report (Itagaki’s Ninja Gaiden demonstration).
Brian Ashcraft, “Itagaki And Tecmo Settle Legal Brouhaha”, Kotaku, 26 February 2010 (web, secondary): the 148 million yen lawsuit for unpaid bonuses and its settlement. https://kotaku.com/itagaki-and-tecmo-settle-legal-brouhaha-5480807
Kenneth Shepard, “Dead Or Alive Creator And Longtime Ninja Gaiden Director Tomonobu Itagaki Has Died At 58”, Kotaku, 16 October 2025 (web, secondary): Itagaki’s death at 58, announced on his Facebook account. https://kotaku.com/tomonobu-itagaki-death-dead-or-alive-team-ninja-gaiden-2000636025
Famitsu.com, 16 October 2025 (web, secondary, in Japanese): Itagaki’s death at 58 and his final message on Facebook. https://www.famitsu.com/article/202510/55345
Square Enix, “Square Enix proposes friendly TOB to Tecmo, Ltd.”, press release, 29 August 2008 (web, secondary). http://www.square-enix.com/na/company/press/2008/0829/
Ninja Gaiden 3 preview, Edge issue 238, March 2012 (Tecmo Koei, Team Ninja, “its first Itagaki-free series entry”).
Dead or Alive 6 review, Wireframe issue 12, April 2019, p. 60: Team Ninja, Koei Tecmo, 62 per cent.
Wireframe issue 48, February 2021: the making of Nioh (first announced by Koei in 2005; developed by Team Ninja).
TJ Denzer, “Ninja Gaiden 4 gets October 2025 release date”, Shacknews, 19 August 2025 (web, secondary): Team Ninja and PlatinumGames; release on 21 October 2025. https://www.shacknews.com/article/145570/ninja-gaiden-4-release-date