If the announcement of Ninja Gaiden 4 seemed to have defused the tensions in PlatinumGames, the company has done something new that at least one former employee is questioning in public.
As reported by NintendoLife, PlatinumGames has removed several of their games on their site. Among these, the only one that hasn’t been released yet is Project G.G. That may be a sign that the game has been cancelled, though we will point out other possibilities.
For example, the project may have been sold or taken over by a new company. If the rumored title is an Ultraman style game, we could see Tsuburaya taking interest in it and picking it up to become a legitimate title in the franchise.
Subsequently, the game may still be under PlatinumGames, and getting a new name soon. If they have reworked the game concept to a dramatic degree, it may no longer make sense to keep that codename.
The other games that were removed are as follows:
- Star Fox Zero
- Transformers: Devastation
- MadWorld
- Sol Cresta
- Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutants in Manhattan
As you can see, most of these games were licensed with other companies. It’s possible that the rights to these games were reverted to those respective companies. For those who don’t know, MadWorld is an original IP, but it and its sequel Anarchy Reigns were published by Sega. Subsequently, Sol Cresta may be a revival of a defunct franchise, but its rights are owned by Hamster, the same company that has been publishing Arcade Archives titles on Switch and PlayStation 5.
As you may imagine, Ninja Gaiden 4 is now the sole unreleased game that’s listed on the site. The other games include the Bayonetta titles, NieR: Automata, Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance, Vanquish, Astral Chain, and The Wonderful 101.
Between these, PlatinumGames may really only have full ownership of The Wonderful 101. We would assume that they still have working relationships with these respective licensees in Sega, Nintendo, Square Enix, and Konami.
Jean Pierre Kellams worked in PlatinumGames through a pivotal five years, from MadWorld in 2009 to Bayonetta 2 in 2014. He’s been around the industry at this point, with a new role as producer in Epic Games after spending quite some time at EA Sports. He watched this play out from afar and shared this statement:
“Saw this on ResetEra, and I have no idea why they did it, but PlatinumGames erasing its history on its website is extremely regrettable. I wonder if the pulled the carpet tiles out of the lobby, too. As someone proud of working on those games, I feel deeply insulted by this.
Someone who recently left said “I’m still rooting for them.” But stuff like this makes that very hard to do. So to whatever localization person is handling the website/PG twitter account, listen to the guy who set both of those things up and maybe reconsider erasing PG’s legacy.”
Of course, PlatinumGames erasing mentions of these games does not erase the fact that we know they made them. There’s a host of other resources, from MobyGames to Wikipedia to IMDB that would still have this information.
As Kellams argues, there’s a symbolic meaning behind these choices. And as much as fans will think of Hideki Kamiya first of all, this is a reminder that there are a lot of other former PlatinumGames staff too. It makes the current management in the company questionable, and we wonder if PlatinumGames will just try to pretend everything is hunky-dory after everything that’s happened moving forward.
