We have an interesting update regarding Ninja Gaiden 4’s development, that really puts the spotlight on Microsoft Gaming’s head honcho, Phil Spencer.
As we reported just yesterday, Spencer revealed in an interview that Microsoft started ‘knocking on doors’ to make the game happen six or seven years ago. At the time, we figured that that was 2017, a pivotal period for both Team Ninja and PlatinumGames. And we speculated that the game may not have happened if Phil hadn’t come to them to pitch it.
As reported by Video Games Chronicle, Team Ninja’s producer Fumihiko Yasuda has added his own side of the story. Yasuda’s story doesn’t conflict with Spencer’s, but it does debunk our speculation about it.
As it turns out, even though Team Ninja had just released Nioh, and were to later follow that up with other maso-core games like Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty, they were also still eager to make a new Ninja Gaiden title. But they were struggling to come up with a good pitch in the fallout of Ninja Gaiden 3’s critical and commercial failure.
Yasuda revealed something we could not have known. PlatinumGames’ President and CEO, Atsushi Inaba, was actually good friends with Hisashi Koinuma. At the time, Koinuma was president of Team Ninja’s parent company, Koei Tecmo.
So Koinuma actually got to talk with Inaba about this stalled upcoming Ninja Gaiden. But the project did not get off the ground until Phil Spencer himself approached the two companies about making the new game with them.
Spencer also turned out to have talked to Destin Legarie about the beginnings of Ninja Gaiden 4. He did confirm that the timeline started in 2017. But once again, he adds an interesting detail we would not have known at the time.
As it turns out, Sarah Bond was already helping him with development of this game. Most of us know of Bond because of her prominent presence representing Microsoft while getting the Activision deal approved with regulators around the world. But she also happened to start working in Microsoft in 2017.
That means Ninja Gaiden 4 is probably also Sarah’s baby, one of her first video game projects after coming over from T-Mobile.
It’s clear now that this isn’t just a simple case of Microsoft finding a game that’s already certain to succeed, and throwing money at it for exclusivity. Spencer was thinking about how to make Ninja Gaiden and PlatinumGames fans happy, and that meant making huge investments in Japan that the public didn’t know for nearly a decade.
If we seem effusive of praise for Spencer at this point, that’s only because he’s clearly earned it. Now we hope for the best, that this combination of two action game specialists can deliver on our expectations.
