Ni-Oh
Description
Ni-Oh is the final name of what started out as a tie-in video game of Oni - a movie produced from an unfinished script left by Akira Kurosawa. Announced as a multimedia project with Kurosawa Production, the Oni video game was set for the then-still-unnamed "next-generation successor to the PlayStation 2 video game console" and a release window of 2006, possibly as a PlayStation 3 launch title. The game was first shown in E3 2005 in a cinematic trailer as "Ni-Oh". Later in the same year, production of the movie was cancelled, but the video game project continued.
In 2006, Ni-Oh would miss its initial release window. Publisher Koei showed the game again at Tokyo Game Show 2006, this time with a new release window of 2007. Ni-Oh would go on to miss this release window and was quietly shelved.
In 2009, soon after the merger of Koei and Tecmo, development would restart from scratch with Team Ninja from the Tecmo side of the newly-formed Koei Tecmo taking over, this time losing the license from Kurosawa Production, losing the hyphen in the name, adopting a new logo, introducing fantasy elements and set in the Team Ninja connected universe (with Ninja Gaiden, Dead or Alive and eventually Rise of the Rōnin), skipping the PlayStation 3 platform, adopting a gameplay subgenre not yet prominent when the original project was created and became Nioh.
