This is an IGN opinion piece from Ryan McCaffrey, who worked at Official Xbox Magazine from 2002-2012 during the original Xbox and Xbox 360 era before joining IGN, where he remains “the Xbox guy.” In the run-up to Xbox’s 25th anniversary, he’ll be sharing his memories from the platform’s first quarter-century.
The Xbox was not always taken seriously – especially in its earliest days, and especially in Japan. “The Windows people? Making a console? They’re a software company.” No matter where you lived, if you were a gamer around the turn of the century, you remember that there was a lot to point and laugh at: the comically massive console. The absurdly large “Duke” controller (later replaced by the much better and smaller Controller S). It was… a lot.
And yes, Halo: Combat Evolved is the game that cemented Xbox’s place in the console industry. No one in their right mind would ever argue that. But it’s also true that up to that point in history, every console needed great games from the incredibly talented developers in Japan in order to survive and thrive. The Xbox, as the first major Western console, didn’t have that. Its early games, like the console itself, mostly came out of the West.
Until a developer named Tomonobu Itagaki, the head of Tecmo’s internal development group Team Ninja (who passed away last year), believed in the Xbox and the additional horsepower it could provide compared to the established industry giant Sony and its PlayStation 2. Itagaki brought his Tekken competitor, Dead or Alive, exclusively to the Xbox as a day-one launch title in November of 2001: Dead or Alive 3. Simply put, it kicked ass. The fighting game genre was an important one, and Xbox already had a fantastic example thanks to Itagaki-san and his Team Ninja crew.
I wasn’t much of a fighting game player back then, but buzz had been building for Itagaki’s next project: Ninja Gaiden, a revival of the beloved – and notoriously challenging – side-scrolling action game for arcades and, later, the NES. And when Itagaki-san brought an early build to the Official Xbox Magazine offices to show it to us, I couldn’t help but notice.
By now you’ve heard about Itagaki and his rockstar persona: the long hair, the sunglasses worn indoors, the black leather jacket and pants. The cigarettes. The dude put it out there, and with Dead or Alive 3 he had already backed it up. With Ninja Gaiden, he was about to take it to another level.
Through a translator, Itagaki-san told us all about Ninja Gaiden and the combat challenge it would offer. It was beautiful, it ran at 60 frames per second, and its combat was stunning just to watch, let alone play. And when it came out, it garnered universal praise and acclaim – which it deserved every bit of. We gave it a 9.6 out of 10 at OXM – then our highest score ever. IGN went with a 9.4. Itagaki-san had squeezed every bit of power and performance out of Microsoft’s fledgling console, and the result was what some people believe – including me and, more importantly, our resident action-game aficionado Mitchell Saltzman – is the single greatest pure action game ever made. You talk about aging well? It wasn’t just the combat, the precision controls, and the replayability that still hold up today. It’s all of that, but it even had native widescreen support back in 2004! When nobody had widescreen displays yet! We were all still on chonky 4:3 CRTs.
Even Itagaki himself could never top Ninja Gaiden (though Ninja Gaiden 2 was pretty damn good anyway), but it didn’t matter. He had shown the Japanese development community that you could do incredible things on the Xbox. And though the Xbox ultimately failed in Japan, it wasn’t for a lack of trying (see what would come later, such as Blue Dragon, Lost Odyssey, Eternal Sonata, and more). And we’ll always have Ninja Gaiden.
Ryan McCaffrey is IGN’s executive editor of previews and host of IGN’s weekly Xbox show, Podcast Unlocked, and a co-host of Next-Gen Console Watch. He’s a North Jersey guy, so it’s “Taylor ham,” not “pork roll.” Debate it with him on Twitter at @DMC_Ryan.