Development
In 1999, Team Ninja started work on the "Next-Generation Ninja Gaiden Project". The first stage of development was to create the game on the Sega NAOMI arcade system board. They then planned to move the project to the Dreamcast console for further development and release, but this was abandoned when Sega announced the end of Dreamcast product line in 2001. At this point, Tecmo decided to release Ninja Gaiden as a launch title for the Sony PlayStation 2 in the United States. Itagaki, however, had other plans; the Team Ninja Leader was impressed with the software development kits for the Xbox and pushed for his team to develop for the Microsoft console. The company kept silent on this change in direction, and surprised both the games industry and fans when they announced at E3 2002 that Ninja Gaiden would be released exclusively on the Xbox gaming console. Most fans who voted on Tecmo's poll wanted the game on the Nintendo GameCube.
Ninja Gaiden was Team Ninja's first action title. Its initial concept had nothing in common with the original Ninja Gaiden series that was released for the NES. However, for retail reasons Tecmo wanted to retain a link with the previous games, which had many adherents in the West, so Itagaki was asked to rethink his ideas to target the foreign market. Analysing the earlier games, he concluded that their violence appealed to players, and included gory content, such as beheadings, in the Xbox game to retain that spirit. He also aimed to make his new game hard but alluring; it would challenge players on their reflexes rather than on their memories of layouts and timings. His team made a point of designing smoothly-flowing gameplay with high-quality animations that reacted quickly to the player's input. Itagaki paid homage to the earlier Ninja Gaiden series by including updated versions of foes and special attacks. Team Ninja based their 3D computer models, from the pistols of the henchman upwards, on real world material. Character models were taken from studies of human anatomy, and the team hired martial artists in order to digitally capture their movement. Rather than import the motion captures directly into the game, however, the animators used them as templates to give a sense of realism to the game characters' exaggerated movements. Itagaki found it more interesting to design nonhuman creatures than human enemies.
Read more about this topic: Ninja Gaiden (2004 Video Game)
Famous quotes containing the word development:
“The American has dwindled into an Odd Fellow—one who may be known by the development of his organ of gregariousness.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The young women, what can they not learn, what can they not achieve, with Columbia University annex thrown open to them? In this great outlook for women’s broader intellectual development I see the great sunburst of the future.”
—M. E. W. Sherwood (1826–1903)
“For the child whose impulsiveness is indulged, who retains his primitive-discharge mechanisms, is not only an ill-behaved child but a child whose intellectual development is slowed down. No matter how well he is endowed intellectually, if direct action and immediate gratification are the guiding principles of his behavior, there will be less incentive to develop the higher mental processes, to reason, to employ the imagination creatively. . . .”
—Selma H. Fraiberg (20th century)