Early YearsTomonobu Itagaki was born in 1967 and he was into video games at a very young age. During his high school years, he made a Gundam and Zaku game with the help of his younger brother. He created the pixels and his brother wrote the assembly code. He said that "pixel coloring" was his first job. After graduating from Waseda University Senior High School on March 1985, Itagaki attended the Waseda University and began to drift himself from gaming to gambling. He became an avid gambler and spent most of his college years gambling. He graduated from its School of Law on March 1992 and after meeting a founder of a game developing company, Itagaki decided to pursue a career in gaming. He began working at Tecmo as a graphics programmer on Tecmo Bowl on that same year.

At the time, Tecmo had a lot of deficits and was suffering financially. They were on a brink of bankruptcy. Itagaki then made a bold move by promising Tecmo's then President Mr. Nakamura that he will make a game that would sell to help revitalize the troubled Tecmo. Leaving no other choice, his boss decided to give it a shot and that was how Dead or Alive came about because it "literally means dead or alive," referring to the fate of Tecmo. It was Tecmo's response to Sega's Virtua Fighter. There he was mentored by Akihiko Shimoji and Yoshiaki Inose, who was involved in the development of Solomon's Key, Bomb Jack, Rygar and the original Ninja Gaiden. Ironically, Dead or Alive used the same fighting engine used in Virtua Fighter but despite the generous licensing, Itagaki received no programming resources from Sega.

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