Veteran developer Tomonobu Itagaki is one of a generation of Japanese developers that helped change the face of gaming like Shigeru Miyamoto, Keiji Inafune and Hironobu Sakaguchi. However, there isn’t a generation of new talent on the rise in Japan right now and that has Itagaki fired up.
“It is terrible”, he says bluntly. “It is the worst thing possible. It’s terrible that there is no younger generation of prominent Japanese developers coming through. The young people of today should be confident. Even if that confidence comes from nowhere, you should act like it comes from somewhere.”
“No . . . I have never slapped a developer in the face. But many, many times I tell them, ‘you shouldn’t be afraid of getting a slap in the face’,” he added. “”Even the masters, like Picasso, can never please everybody. When you create something, there will always be people who don’t like it. There are people who don’t like what I make, and say bad things about them, and to me that’s like a slap in the face. So young people need to be more confident, they have to be willing to crash into something ahead of them whether other people like it or not.”
