In 2010 Koei (now Koei Tecmo) announced that Tecmo's Team Ninja would be finishing development of the game, which had been suspended by Koei. It wasn't until 2009 that Koei confirmed that the game was still in development, apologizing for the lack of updates. The game missed the initial 2006 release window without comment from Koei. A pre-rendered game trailer was shown at the 2005 Electronic Entertainment Expo, and a similar trailer was shown at the 2006 Tokyo Game Show. The first announced release date of the current iteration of Nioh was summer of 2006 for the PlayStation 3.
The game originally centered around the eponymous protagonist, Oni, the son of a Japanese lord and a Western woman, and was set in Japan during the 16th century. Hisao Kurosawa was completing his father's script with assistance from game producer Kou Shibusawa of Koei, with a combined production budget of ¥ 3 billion for both film and game. The game was to be released with a companion film, also titled Oni, that would have seen the directorial debut of Hisao Kurosawa, Akira Kurosawa's son. Originally announced by Koei in 2004 (before the merger with Tecmo), the game was to be based on an unfinished script by filmmaker Akira Kurosawa titled Oni. The game was released on February 7th, 2017.
Nioh (Japanese: 仁王) is a historical fantasy action role-playing video game developed by Team Ninja and published by Koei Tecmo for the PlayStation 4.