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The reveal of Ninja Gaiden 4 at last week’s Xbox Developer Direct was one of the show’s highlights. Not only did the announcement unveil an unexpected collaboration between original series developer, Team Ninja, and the spectacle fighter masters at PlatinumGames, Xbox sweetened the deal with a shadow drop of a modern remaster of Ninja Gaiden 2.
To bring together two storied teams from two different sides of the action game genre, however, wasn’t easy, but it was Xbox boss Phil Spencer who made it happen.
Tea Ninja producer, Fumihiko Yasuda, revealed in a new Game Watch [Japanese] (via VGC) interview that the studio had been trying to come up with a plan to bring back Ninja Gaiden in a big way and create a new game in the series, but couldn’t quite figure out all the details.
It wasn’t until meeting with Phil Spencer that ideas began percolating. The veteran games executive was the one to suggest bringing three entities together for the next numbered Ninja Gaiden: Team Ninja, Koei Tecmo, and PlatinumGames.
Prior to that, Koei Tecmo president Hisashi Koinuma, and PlatinumGames president Atsushi Inaba toyed around with the idea of a possible collaboration, but it was ultimately Spencer who brought it all together.
“We have developed action games ourselves, but as we were about to launch Ninja Gaiden for the first time in over a decade, PlatinumGames has previously created a variety of fantastic action titles, such as Bayonetta, and NieR: Automata, so we were keen to work with them, and that’s how we began our collaboration,” Yasuda added (machine translated).
PlatinumGames has a history of delivering stellar titles built on other studios’ franchises. Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance, as well as NieR: Automata are two great examples of that, so there’s a lot of hope for Ninja Gaiden 4 to join the list of all-time great action games – and that reveal certainly struck a few right cords.
Ninja Gaiden 4 arrives this fall on PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X/S.
Kurt Indovina
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