Wireframe - #35 - 2020

wfmag.cc \ 51

Tecmo \^ Tecmo \^ Developer Profile

Profile

Interface

Tecmo’s Touchdown

Sports games were common enough even in the late eighties, so it’s worth reiterating just how

unusual it is that Tecmo Bowl – and particularly its 1991 sequel, Tecmo Super Bowl – still have such

a dedicated following. The NES American football game struck an addictive balance between fast

action and quasi-realistic simulation, and its timeless quality means that players are still arranging

(and streaming) Tecmo Super Bowl tournaments almost 30 years later. According to a 2016 article

on sports website The Ringer, veteran players who once appeared in the game are still getting fans

come up to them and compliment their in-game counterpart’s football prowess. “It cracks me up,”

said former Miami Dolphins linebacker, John Offerdahl. “They have a higher opinion of me than they

probably should.”

small teams worked quickly on games
over the course of a few months; from
this fruitful period came such cult titles
as Bomb Jack, Solomon’s Key, Rygar, and
Star Force. Ninja Gaiden, meanwhile, got
its start when Tecmo boss Yoshihito
Kakihara noted the growing ninja craze
in America, and set two teams to work
on different projects with the same
name. The first was a
belt-scrolling arcade
game in the vein of
Double Dragon – it
was a violent brawler
where the central
character could hang from bits of the
scenery and kick bad guys clear across
screen. The NES version of Ninja Gaiden,
on the other hand, was completely
different, and largely unrelated to the
coin-op aside from the look of its athletic
hero. A rock-hard action platformer
which made innovative use of cutscenes
to tell its story, Ninja Gaiden was among
the finest third-party games ever made
for Nintendo’s console, and spawned a
wealth of sequels and ports.
Tecmo had begun to flag financially
by the mid-nineties, before it received

a renewed burst of energy with the

founding of Team Ninja, a design group

headed up by the now legendary

Tomonobu Itagaki. Handed the task of

making a rival to Sega’s Virtua Fighter,

Itagaki and his team came up with Dead

or Alive – a one-on-one brawler whose

success, particularly on the PlayStation,

helped pull Tecmo back from the

financial brink. Team Ninja continued

to make some of the best games for

Tecmo over the next decade or so, from

numerous Dead or

Alive sequels to the

bloodthirsty Ninja

Gaiden revival in 2004.

Clouds began to

form for Tecmo in the

2000s, though, first with the untimely

passing of Kakihara, its president and

co-founder, in 2006. In its own way, the

resignation of Itagaki two years later was

an even bigger blow; his $1.4 million

lawsuit against Tecmo for alleged unpaid

bonuses prompted 300 other Tecmo

employees to file a similar high-profile

case of their own.

With financial woes once again

beckoning, Tecmo eventually merged

with another long-standing developer

and publisher, Koei, in 2008, which

effectively signalled the beginning of

the end for the firm. Team Ninja and its

other divisions still exist under the Koei

Tecmo umbrella, but Tecmo essentially

went the way of the dodo in 2010. As is

so often the case in the games industry,

Tecmo’s creations – Ninja Gaiden, Dead

or Alive, Fatal Frame, and yes, even Tecmo

Bowl – have far outlived the studio that

first made them.

 Tecmo were on the ropes in the mid-nineties.

The success of Team Ninja’s Dead or Alive

helped put it back in contention.

 Brutally tough but hugely rewarding, the

8-bit Ninja Gaiden games are still a

touch point for indie developers today.

“Tecmo had begun

to flag financially by

the mid-nineties”

 The Ninja Gaiden series came back in

style in the 2000s, with Ninja Gaiden

Black (pictured) being a high point.