left their companies, and his partner invited him to join him in making a new mobile game company, but Igarashi initially refused as he did not want to work on mobile games. ArtPlay has both a Chinese branch and a Japanese branch, and Igarashi works in the Japanese one. The goal of the company is to be both a mobile and console game company, with profits from mobile games leading to development of console games, and the console games will spawn mobile spinoffs. The Artplay website lists 2.3 billion yen in capital. In 2015, Igarashi appeared at the ChinaJoy Game Developer Conference (CDGC) in China. Drawing inspiration in Keiji Inafune, who had left Capcom to form his own studio and launch his new game Mighty No. 9 via crowd sourcing, Igarashi decided to launch his own Kickstarter campaign for his new project. A month prior to the launch of the kickstarter campaign, Igarashi filmed a pitch at Castello di Amorosa in Northern California with the help of 2 Player Productions. Launched in May 2015, Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night – a spiritual successor to the Metroidvania style of Castlevania games – had asked for US$500,000, and was funded in several hours after its opening. It eventually raised US$5.5 million, making it the most successful video game on the Kickstarter platform until Shenmue III broke this record about two months later. Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night was released on multiple platformes in June 2019 and received favorable reviews. Alongside Bloodstained, ArtPlay also announced in 2015 the mobile game Code S Plan. In October 2018, Igarashi was announced to be working with Sega on a game titled Revolve8. Revolve8: Episodic Duelling, a player versus player real-time strategy mobile game, was released in February 2019 on iOS and Android. Works References External links Igarashi's personal blog Artplay's official website ArtPlay's official website 1968 births Castlevania Konami people Living people Japanese video game producers Japanese video game programmers