Rumor: Team Ninja leaving Tecmo

Something smelt quite fishy when news broke that Tomonobu Itagaki left his long-time employer Tecmo and in the same move sued the company for not paying out bonuses for completed games. Was he the only one affected or what?! Now 1UP ran a story that basically said: No, he wasn't the only one and ...

Word on the street is that key members of Team Ninja -- as many as three dozen or more -- are headed out the door as well [...]

1UP
... and that they plan to also sue the company for - I guess - the same reason as Itagaki. If this is true, there will not all that much be left of the company whose franchises "Ninja Gaiden" and "Dead or Alive" are 2 of the most popular franchises on Microsoft's Xbox and Xbox360 ... except for the rights on these franchises but without the knowledge and experience of those people who created them, since both were developed by Team Ninja. Sure, there are still the "Tokobot" series -- if you can even call it a series considering that it only had one game on the PSP and a slightly improved version of the same game on the PS2 -- and the "Super Swing Golf" series on the Wii, but none of them ended up all that good -- each being in the mid 60s to low 70s on metacritics. If this rumor is really true, then Tecmo better get good people to replace those people. Otherwise they will probably go the way of the Atari dodo.