Koji "IGA" Igarashi leaves Konami

[Guts]

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2014-03-17-castlevania-developer-koji-igarashi-leaves-konami

Koji Igarashi, known as the producer of many Castlevania titles, has left Konami after working for the company since 1990, to form his own studio.

It's sad that Konami obviously shoved IGA aside to let Mercury Steam "westernize" Castlevania, this probably means that we'll never see a decent 2D Metroidvania ever again. Still, I guess it's better if he'll be able to make the game that he wants instead of doing nothing at Konami. Anyone want to bet how long it takes for IGA to appear on Kickstarter?

Does Konami now even have any in-house developers left barring Hideo Kojima? Seems like all of their beloved series are either outsourced (Castlevania, Silent Hill) or left for dead (Suikoden, Goemon).

[Golgo]

What have Konami had him doing all this time while johnny foreigners have been busy wrecking his game?

[nakamura]

We don't need another Casltevania. Iga can make his own version of the game instead!

[fishbowlhead]

Lords of shadow hardly wrecked the series, first game was fantastic, just a shame the second had development problems.

This will be great for IGA, with psn, live, Steam & ninty online it's never been better to start a small studio.

['Press Start']

This will be great for IGA, with psn, live, Steam & ninty online it's never been better to start a small studio.

Indeed. No doubt he has some great contacts and now his talent has been set free to experiment we should hopefully see something exciting.

[Guts]

Yeah, it's probably better for him, I noticed on Wikipedia that he's been producer on some Kinect game at Konami *yuck*.

Just a shame that now Castlevania will probably be FUBAR, like other beloved classics. I heard that the new one is pretty much crap.

[ShadowDancer]

Only great 3d castlevania in history was IGA's lament of innocence, although, curse of darkness is about as good as nanobreaker, probably should of been canned. The majority of his 2d castlevanias are Godly. Portrait of ruin was the only mediocre one.

[Guts]

Lament of Innocence was a great 3D action game and a great Castlevania game, really enjoyed it back in the day. Probably also inspired God of War at least partly.

Just feels disrespectful from Konami to shove the man who worked with the series for over 15 years in the background and just hand it out to some unproven western studio instead. No wonder he left.

Btw. hope he takes Ayami Kojima with her to provide character design/art for his new games, she's a fantastic artist.

Edit: Going to reminiscence IGA's work with Castlevania with one of the best game soundtracks ever made.

['Press Start']

Edit: Going to reminiscence IGA's work with Castlevania with one of the best game soundtracks ever made.

I here that. It sits in the Top 5 games ever for me, same for the soundtrack:-

[Wools]

To be honest, when was the last time anyone excited for a Konami release? It feels like they dropped straight off the edge of the earth.

[Guts]

They have Metal Gear Solid and that's about it, I guess. Like I said in the first post, it seems they've either outsourced all of their games to someone else or simply killed them. Don't know if there's any talent left there besides Kojima, they're just a shadow of their former glory (like pretty much every single big Japanese game house).

[Yakumo]

To be honest, when was the last time anyone excited for a Konami release? It feels like they dropped straight off the edge of the earth.

Too right. At one time Konami made some amazing games, fun games and games that we'll never forget. Ever since the end of the DC and PS2 they really started to drop in quality as they focused on the Beatmania/DDR/Pop'n Music series (great series but milked too much) and stupid card based games (here in Japan) and then decided that they wanted to be a fitness company and open up gyms all around the country. Ever since then they've been pretty **** IMO with way too much outsourcing. In fact, what was the last great game that Konami actually made in house?

[Guts]

Metal Gear Solid 4 probably.

Edit: Looked at Konami's games and in 2001 they released:

-Metal Gear Solid 2
-Shadow of Memories
-Silent Hill 2
-Zone of the Enders

All made in-house. Talk about former glory.

[Yakumo]

wow, 2001. That's 13 years ago. Maybe longer than some of the readers of this post have been alive hahaha.

[nakamura]

SNES and Konami were a match made in heaven. Second only to Nintendo l.