Hideaki Itsuno has revealed that he has left Capcom.
He shared this message on Twitter:
“At the end of August 2024, I will be leaving Capcom after 30 years and 5 months.
Thank you for your long-term support of the games and characters I have been responsible for. I hope you will continue to support Capcom’s games and characters.
From September, I will start developing a new game in a new environment.
I hope to create fun, beautiful games that are as memorable as, or even more memorable than, the ones I have created so far.
Please stay tuned for my next creation!”
Hideaki Itsuno’s career spanned a variety of games and genres. Most fans today rightly know him as the director of the Dragon’s Dogma franchise. Although most fans associate Devil May Cry with the director of the first game, Hideki Kamiya, Itsuno was literally the director for the Devil May Cry franchise after him. That includes the reviled DmC reboot, and the much applauded return to the main timeline with Devil May Cry 5.
And of course, we would be remiss not to mention his work in fighting games. Itsuno went to work at Capcom because of Street Fighter, and as he pointed out a few days ago, most of the games in the upcoming Capcom Fighting Collection 2 were made by his team.
Much has been written about how Japan’s video game industry has managed to avoid entering the same wave of layoffs that the US and Europe industries have been in in the last two years. But we may take note how common it is for veteran game designers to leave these companies.
Bandai Namco manager and Project Tekken head Katsuhiro Harada staying where he is in the company is definitely the exception, and not the rule for the industry. Over the last decade, we have seen the exits of Koji Igarashi, Hideo Kojima, Yoshinori Ono, Toshihiro Nagoshi, Shinji Mikami, and the aforementioned Hideki Kamiya, from their respective companies. Those reasons may be different, but it is worth noting how common it is, and how unusual it is for veterans of these companies to do so.
We wish Hideaki Itsuno the best, and it certainly sounds like he already had well laid plans in place for what to do next. Perhaps he received a too-good-to-be-true offer like Nagoshi did from NetEase? It certainly seemed like he was in good standing with Capcom as it is, as he just released a potential GOTY contender in Dragon’s Dogma 2 for them. Whatever the case, we are sure the future is bright for him, and his colleagues at Capcom.
