Beloved Developer Quits Konami Due to "Disagreements"

Have you heard of Momotaro Dentetsu? Not to sound too hipster or anything, but you probably haven’t, unless you happen to live in Japan. While Momotaro Dentetsu, a board-game style game where you travel around Japan making business deals and thwarting your rival “The God of Poverty”, is virtually unknown here in the states, in Japan, it’s gigantically popular. It’s also one of those rare game franchises that is largely headed by one noteworthy individual: for the Souls series, that’s Hidetaka Miyazaki. For Metroidvania games (I refuse to call it Igavania) it’s Koji Igarashi. And for Momotaro Dentetsu, it’s Akira Sakuma.

Akira Sakuma started the Momotaro Dentetsu franchise under Huston, a game company that has since been bought and absorbed into the now loathed Konami—and now you’ve figured out why I’m writing about this, haven’t you?

Like the rest of us, Akira Sakuma wasn’t the worlds biggest Konami fan, and under their wing he has “quit” and “ended the Momotaro franchise” several times in the past—and today he announced he’s doing it all again, but this time it’s “official” so he must really mean it this time.

As for what Akira dislikes specifically about Konami, well, that’s a bit hard to peg. When Huston was first bought, he said that he would cancel the series if his old team was dissolved and a new team brought under his wing—an honorable attempt to shield your friends, I’d say—but it appears that didn’t work. His team was dissolved, and he swore of making the games until a guy named “Imura” no longer worked at Konami.

Flash forward to today, and he tweets the following:

“Konami hasn’t gotten in touch with me at all. This is how they’ve tossed me aside for a while now. I’m announcing here that Momotaro Dentetsu is officially done. Ishikawa at Konami squelched everything.”

So the series is over. Kind of. While Konami owns the rights to Momotaro Dentetsu, and can technically make another, there’s something of a cult following behind Akira, and it’s unlikely anyone would buy a Momotaro Dentetsu game he himself didn’t create.

This, obviously, doesn’t affect you at all, unless you’re here to practice reading English, in which case, good job! But for the rest of us, it serves as little more than an example of Konami’s ever-graceless spiral into shame and failure. The question we must ask now, is: when will it stop?