Suda51 Talks About His Crazy Fever Dream Games

Posted by Matt Little , Apr, 2009 @ 12:40 pm

Earlier this week, I made some awkward comparisons between gaming and music. If we continue down that route, then designer Suda51 (aka Goichi Suda) is the Frank Zappa of game designers. As head of Grasshopper Manufacture, most of his games are highly stylized, odd pieces of art that usually make me cock my head to one side and think “How the hell did they come up with THAT?” In fact, the majority of his body of work isn’t available in North America, for what I’m guessing is that exact reason.

If you’ve been someone lucky enough to pick up Killer7, or No More Heroes, and think that thought, this interview with GameSetWatch delves a bit in to the process behind the studios innovation. Here’s a hint: they WORK TOGETHER.

If you asked me what I consider to be Grasshopper’s most unique trait, it’s that we create games not by crafting individual parts and building them up like blocks, but by first considering what sort of emotional response we want to get from the player. That’s a big part of what makes a game Grasshopper-like, the message we try to send.

More good stuff in the interview here.

Interview: Suda51 Talks Pushing Style, Pursuing Freshness [GameSetWatch]
Wikipedia: Suda51

Tags: game set watch, goichi suda, interviews, killer7, no more heroes, suda51