Suda51 on Romeo is a Dead Man, Grasshopper Manufacture, game development, Switch
by Mikhail Madnani on 30 October, 2026 Following the launch of Romeo is a Dead Man, I had a chance to interview Goichi "Suda51" Suda about his career, Romeo is a Dead Man, potential remaster projects, life before the…
by Mikhail Madnani on 30 October, 2026
Goichi "Suda51" Suda: This is Suda, CEO of Grasshopper Manufacture. Right now, on top of running the company, I'm also in the middle of setting up a few things that we're working on for the future as well. New titles and stuff.RPG Site: Is it true that before you joined the games industry, you were an undertaker?
Suda51: Yeah, I actually worked in the funeral business, specifically at a crematorium and a flower shop just before I joined the game industry.RPG Site: Looking back at Grasshopper's early days, you had a lot of games on PlayStation consoles and Nintendo handhelds. So many publishers and companies are doing legacy collections and remasters. I was wondering if you would like to do a Suda51 or say a "Grasshopper Classics Collection" if you had the opportunity?
Suda51: It would be cool to be able to put something like that out. I think if I were to put out something like a "Suda51 Classics Collection" or something like that, it would probably consist of the games that I worked on before I started Grasshopper, when I was at the company called Human.
I was involved in the development of about five games altogether at the time. The only issue or the main issue with that is that the rights for those games are kind of all over the place. So, it would probably be pretty difficult to get it done. But, if I was able to, that would definitely be something that would be cool to try out sometime.RPG Site: Before we get into more Grasshopper, I'm curious about how you feel about the Fire Pro series right now.
Suda51: Regarding Fire Pro, as you probably know, it was my debut title in the game industry. Before that, I was just a gamer. It was once I got into Human, and made Fire Pro, that I really actually jumped into the game industry. So it's a title and a series that means a lot to me because of that.
The series itself was already pretty well known at the time for not just being a simple pro wrestling game. It was more of a pro wrestling game that really sort of captured the Super Nintendo or Super Famicom culture back in the day. You could use the four player adapter thing to play, you know, tag matches with up to four people. It was a really interesting take on pro wrestling and pro wrestling games. It was also kind of considered to be like a good party game at the time, too, since you know, you could play with multiple people and stuff.
Everybody from elementary school students up through adults seem to really enjoy it. It was a great game, great series. When I first joined the industry and started working on Fire Pro, I was really happy that I was able to work on that game. When I worked on the second game, Fire Pro Special, I got to work on the - at the time - newly added story mode and since it's not only my debut title, but also just a great series in general, I'm really kind of proud of that and I really look back on it fondly.RPG Site: It has been a few years now. Well, more than a few years, since the pandemic has sort of changed how the passage of time feels. How do you view Grasshopper itself as a company and how it has grown in recent years?
Suda51: The past five or six years especially, as you mentioned, with the pandemic and everything, have brought a lot of changes to Grasshopper in a lot of ways. For one thing, we moved out of the GungHo group and joined the NetEase group, and then we became independent once again. We were able to bring back and continue the No More Heroes series - which is, as you know, one of the biggest and most important IPs for us – with Travis Strikes Again: No More Heroes and No More Heroes III.
A lot of things, not only in society as a whole, but within the company itself changed. So yeah, it's been one of the most, I guess you could say, change-filled periods in our company's history so far.Advertisement. Keep scrolling for moreRPG Site: Before Romeo is a Dead Man, most of your games debuted on one platform, then probably got a port, and eventually saw more ports or remasters and stuff. Romeo is a Dead Man is the first multiplatform launch in a long time. It also got a worldwide simultaneous multiplatform release. How does it feel for the studio to have finally done that for such a big title?
Suda51: It's not that we intend to have these kinds of staggered releases. Now that you mention it, thinking back on it, it does tend to happen with our games a lot. Not necessarily on purpose, but we have had games where it's like, okay, first it's going to be out on the Switch and then it'll be out on something else and something else.
With Romeo, we were able to put it out on multiple platforms at the same time, as you mentioned. I'm really glad that we were able to get it out all at the same time. I'm really glad we were able to get it out at all, but honestly, it was pretty difficult. It was pretty rough mainly because this time, we self-published it. With that I really got a sense of how hard it is not only for publishers, but especially for a dev to publish their own game. There were a lot of difficulties, a lot of hurdles to overcome and stuff. While being really happy that we were able to get everything out all at once, again, it was pretty hard getting it done.
RPG Site: Did you have any specific publishing help? I know you self-published, but did you have any help from Microsoft and Sony on the console versions?
Suda51: Yeah, for PlayStation, for example, they had us on their State of Play. They let us show it off there. But in general, both Sony and Microsoft helped us out a lot kind of in the background. Sorting things out, making sure everything was on track.RPG Site: When I played Travis Strikes Again: No More Heroes, thinking back to the reveal, there were a lot of fans who were disappointed that it wasn't "No More Heroes 3," but then when you play it, and if you've played Grasshopper games or Suda51 games, you know it's the real deal. It was a fantastic game. Then No More Heroes 3 came out of course, which was the actual numbered sequel. Romeo is a Dead Man, despite not being an old IP, still feels like a proper Grasshopper Manufacture game. It's not a small scale project either, but a full big game. What do you think defines a Grasshopper game?
Suda51: That's a tough one. It's a really hard question. I get asked this sometimes, but what exactly defines a Grasshopper game? In some ways, a Grasshopper game is similar to any other game. You start out with like, a game design document, we've got the basic idea for “okay, we want to make this kind of game,” but pretty much after that, a lot of our development process, it tends to work, a lot differently from the way it works in a lot of other companies.
We have a lot of what I guess you could call “ad lib development” going on. Instead of just having one guy like me, or somebody else sit down and say, "Okay, this is the kind of game we're going to make. Make this game. You do this. You do this. You do this," we have lots of meetings and we all sit there and kind of bounce ideas back and forth off each other, and brainstorm, and be like, "Oh, yeah, that sounds cool. Let's put that in or okay, we tried this but it didn't really work so hey let's try to tweak it this way and kind of make it like this instead. Oh yeah, that sounds cool. Let's do that!" A lot of the decisions for how the final product comes out and how the game ends up looking and feeling and playing, are made during these semi-casual meetings.
Again, just a bunch of dudes working on a game, just kind of riffing on each other, and coming up with ideas and just on the spot. "Yeah, that sounds cool. We will do it just because it sounds like it's going to be fun regardless of how easy or difficult it might be to actually implement. And of course, once we get into the actual implementation stage, we have to make some tough judgment calls.
I think when you play the games, especially with something like Romeo, I think a lot of people can tell that this is a big mixture of a bunch of stuff. It's not just one guy. There are clearly a bunch of people involved in the creation of this game, a bunch of people had input, and luckily the people that we have working on this stuff, and the ideas that we get, luckily they seem to tend to come together really well and mesh really well together. I think that feeling that there are definitely a bunch of people working on this, and everything was sort of thrown together, not in a lazy way, but just in kind of like an ad-libbed off-the-cuff way, I think maybe that's one of the things that makes a Grasshopper game a Grasshopper game.
But, running Grasshopper myself, it's kind of hard to look at it objectively, but that's how I feel.RPG Site: A lot of creators reference some of their older projects in new ones, but with Grasshopper, you kind of expect it at this point and all the fans love it. I remember when I got Romeo for review, in the first 15 minutes, I had like five things I wanted to potentially bring up if I ever got this interview opportunity. What do you think of the "Suda51 connected universe" which is what some fans call it now?
Suda51: Are you familiar with the Japanese manga artist, who is pretty much the “God of Manga”, named Osamu Tezuka?
RPG Site: No.
Suda51: You may not know that he had what was called the Star System which is basically sort of the same thing, like recently, a lot of things are known as something-verse or the something universe. His work was the first work that I encountered that incorporated something like that.
What he would do is instead of having the same characters appear in different works, he treated his characters more like actors where you would have a character in one work, and another work that would look the same, but they would be called something else, or they would have different personalities.
Conversely, you might have two characters who look different or are called something else, but it was clearly the same personality, same manner of speaking, and stuff like that. I always thought that was really cool, and that was a really cool and interesting approach to creating stuff like manga, anime, games, and everything. I wouldn't say that when I make games I'm thinking that I have to make this like the Star System or anything like that.
It's just that as I started making games, that influence from Tezuka's Star System was there, but it's not so much that I'm conscious of that and thinking "Okay, I got to make this like the Star System" or "I have to make this like a Suda-verse". It just sort of came naturally to me in the way that I write, and the way that I think up ideas for games. It's just something that kind of tends to happen when I create stories and think about how to use different characters, and these things just pop up when I'm making a game. I'll be like, "Oh, actually, yeah, this character would be a really good fit here, but it would be even better if I changed them like this."
Like I said earlier, these days you have a lot of Something-verse or Something Universe things whatever, but for me, the OG would be Osamu Tezuka's Star System.RPG Site: That actually leads into my next question nicely. You have Midori Midorikawa, but then in Romeo is a Dead Man, she's GreenRiver. Was that also because of this Star System philosophy? The second question i have on this is why does she hate the color green?
Suda51: Regarding Midori Midorikawa, my memory is a bit foggy on exactly where everything came from, and how it came together, but basically she's a member of the Space-Time Police. In my head at least, she's always been connected to the Space-Time Police. Back in The Silver Case, there were two guys named Aoyama and Akama, which in Japanese incorporate the words blue and red.
I always had this thing, this kind of I guess mini system that I was thinking of where we'd have like red and blue and green kind of tied together somehow. Anyway, as far as I'm concerned, that's where she got her start. She's always been somehow connected to the Space-Time Police. For Romeo, I decided to have her use a sort of alias in the game. I mean, it's not exactly an alias because “Midorikawa” literally means “green river”, but it’s similar to an alias.
Also, as for why she hates the color green, for one thing, it's in her name. I mean, it's in her name twice, so she gets kind of tired of it because of that. Also, in her character settings in my head, she, uh, she's got this, uh, this quirk about her she hates vegetables in general. You know, there are some people in the real world who can't eat food for certain reasons. So on top of disliking vegetables, she also can't eat green foods. All that stuff put together makes her just have this kind of aversion to the color green.RPG Site: It was obviously a challenge getting Romeo on PlayStation, Xbox, and Steam with multiple hardware configurations day one. You've spoken about the Switch 2 version in the past in passing. Can you give me a status update on that? Is it still happening soon?
Suda51: As you said, I'd mentioned before a couple times about wanting to do a Switch 2 version. It is something that we've really been wanting to do. We talked to a number of companies about getting the porting and the package version done, and everything. For a while it was looking like things were going pretty well. Unfortunately, most of those ended up falling through for one reason or another. It's still something that we hope to be able to get out there.
We'd really like to get Romeo on Nintendo hardware. What we feel we need to focus on first, is getting a physical version at all. So if we were going to do the Switch 2 version, it would probably be after we're able to get some sort of physical version out.
Another thing is since the Romeo IP belongs to NetEase Games, it's not just us. We can't just make the decision on our own. We're going to continue talking with NetEase and we're going to continue talking with some of the companies with whom we're still in discussions. It's not that it's just been canceled or anything. We do want to try to get it out somehow. That's pretty much how the situation is at the moment and that's all that I can really say about it at this point.
As Grasshopper, we really do want to do the physical version and the Switch 2 version. We really want to get it out there. We have a deep understanding of how important physical media is, especially these days. If we got the okay, we could probably actually get it done pretty quickly. We're doing everything that we can to convince all related parties, "Yes, this is a good idea. This is what we want. This is what people want, so let us do it." We're trying to do whatever we can to make that happen.RPG Site: One thing I appreciate a lot based on your interviews and when you talk about your games, is you always talk about the people you work with. Even though some people assume Suda51 does everything, you always bring up folks like Ren Yamazaki and such. How has it been working with these folks for so long?
Suda51: To be honest, the way indie games and stuff are these days, if I decided to, I might be able to make a game all by myself, like a small indie game or something. But that's not how we make games here at Grasshopper. That's not how it is for most companies.
As you said, there are a lot of people working on the game, a lot of people who I work with together, and the reason that we're able to make the games that we make, is definitely not just because of my own work alone. It's because of all these people that we have working together. We've got some really great people that we work with both in and out of the company. All their skills and all the things that they're really proficient in, everybody bringing that together and working together, is how our games get made.
When making a game, I’m not really the kind of person who is like, "Okay this is the kind of game I want to make. This is how it's going to be done." Well, there was a time when I sort of was, but... I prefer to get everybody’s opinions since I know that the people I'm working with are really good at what they do.
I prefer to get everyone's input and take advantage of the skills and proficiencies that people have. I think that's how we're able to make the best games possible. I always want to make sure to show respect for the rest of my team and our collaborators as opposed to just trying to take credit for it, or allowing other people to simply give me credit. That's basically the way I felt about game development ever since I started out. That's one thing that I strive to always remember: having a lot of respect for the people that I work with, and for the people who help me, and help us to get these games done.Advertisement. Keep scrolling for moreRPG Site: When you did the accolades trailer for Romeo, you used RPG Site's review in it and some others, but you also used some low scores which I found kind of funny. How does it feel to have such a spread of review scores for your work, and also that you are able to showcase both sides of the spectrum in your trailers.
Suda51: To be honest, when we're making each game, we hope that everybody's going to like the game, and we hope to get good scores from everybody. Sometimes it just doesn't work out though, like you said. The games can be pretty divisive. As for the accolades trailer, the reason we made it that way is to be honest, we just kind of felt like, a lot of companies make these accolade trailers and they always put like 10 out of 10, you know, really high scores and everything, but especially when you've got games like ours, we felt that that would just be kind of lame.
We know that there's people out there giving it lower scores, and we know there's people out there who aren't going to like it and appreciate it as much as other people. So let's be honest about this and we got some really good scores, like from you guys, thanks a lot for that. We got some really good scores from some other people as well, but we thought it would be a bit more, I guess you could say, open and honest to put one or two lower scores in there as well.
We also just kind of thought it was funny. So another thing is when you try to do something like that, you try to ask a media outlet who gave you a low score to use their score, a lot of times they're like, "Oh no, please don't use that." Maybe they kind of regret having put the score or they get kind of embarrassed or something when asked.
Whatever the reason is, most of the time they don't like having their scores used like that. This time it was a French outlet, called GameKult, they were the one in the accolades trailer with the lowest score. We asked them, "Hey, is it cool if we use you guys, you know, this is how we're going to use it? Is it cool if we use your score?" And they were like, "Yeah, that's fine." And just totally okayed it. We really appreciated that. We were glad that they were cool with that. GameKult really is an awesome media outlet.
To go off on a bit of a tangent here, we originally wanted to do the same thing for Shadows of the Damned Hella Remastered. We wanted a trailer with all these really good scores and have like a couple shitty scores as well. But at the time our parent company NetEase stopped us. We're glad that we were able to finally get that done this time.
Another thing to add on to that, is when you see an accolade trailer for a game where, you know, it's got all like “10 out of 10” or like “100 points”, whatever. It feels to me like when a little kid gets like 100% on a test at school, and they're like, "Mommy, look, I got 100%." It's just weird and kind of creepy and lame, you know? To be honest, I don't really want to play a game that reminds me of a little kid like that. Everyone says it's perfect. Everyone says it's the greatest thing ever. If there's nothing wrong with it at all, I don't really want to make those games, and I'm not really interested in those. I kind of wanted to emphasize the fact that that's not the kind of game this is. But if our next game gets nothing but high scores and I start bragging about it, please be sure to diss the hell out of us, telling people how lame Suda51 and Grasshopper are!RPG Site: Going back to the references you put in games, I appreciate when you reference certain films, and you had Takashi Miike in No More Heroes 3. I wasn't familiar with him back then, but I have since put a few movies on my watch list. I'm just curious what you would pick as your favorite films he has done and also in general like in the Criterion Closet if you're familiar with how creatives pick out movies there.
Suda51: There's a bunch actually, and to be honest, it kind of depends on my mood on any particular day, how I happen to be feeling. I'd probably start off with a couple different Japanese anime. One reason that I'd like to recommend these to people is because there's a lot of stuff that you can't find on streaming sites, or a lot of stuff that you can't find on like, you know, the anime distribution sites, and stuff like that. There are a couple in particular. One of them is in the Gundam series. It's called Mobile Suit Gundam Char's Counterattack. That's pretty much like a given.
RPG Site: I've watched that. It is great.
Suda51: That's one that everybody's got to see. The next one is called Space Runaway Ideon. It's not as big as Gundam, but that's another great one that I think everyone should watch if possible. The next one would be the movie version of an anime called Cobra. I believe it's full title is Cobra Space Adventure and there's another movie version of another anime called Aim for the Ace! Do you know this one in Japanese? It's a pretty, well-known, and famous anime. It's about tennis, and it's pretty much known as a classic here in Japan, but the movie version of that actually had some pretty heavy influence on parts of No More Heroes. For Aim for the Ace!, there's a team of two guys who work together a lot: director Osamu Dezaki and Akio Sugino, make an amazing team. So their stuff is also something that I'd like to recommend.
There's another one that's out called Mobile Suit Gundam Hathaway. Are you aware of this or have you seen it?
RPG Site: I've not seen it, but it is supposed to be on Netflix so I will watch it there when I can.
Suda51: Be sure to check it out.
Moving away from anime and going back to Takashi Miike, who did Ichi The Killer and Audition, which are pretty popular overseas, I'd say Gozu. That's kind of like the entry point for Takashi Miike movies. Another one of his legendary earlier films is Dead or Alive. If we're talking about pure action films, there are samurai movies like 13 Assassins that are well worth watching. Visitor Q, which depicts family love, also showcases Miike's unique take on the nature of love. (laughs) I could go on for days and days about which movies I'd like to recommend, but I'll keep it to these ones for now.RPG Site: I've lost track of time and forgot it has been 8 years since Travis Strikes Again. I want to give a shout out to two friends who got me deeper into Suda51 games over the years. One is an artist, Geistbox, and one is Dreamboum, who made the Kill The Past Primer. They are both the biggest Suda fans I know. Have you seen their art and posts about your games? Also how is it interacting with fans online and offline at events since you are active on social media.
Suda51: Yeah, I've definitely seen the Kill The Past Primer. It is pretty famous and well-informed. It’s thanks to the passionate support of all the fans like them that we’re able to keep on going, but recently I haven't really had the opportunity to meet and interact directly with fans much like at events and stuff like that. Obviously we've got social media and so I'm able to talk with fans and see what they're saying and discuss things with them sometimes on there when I'm not too busy and everything. Last year we went to gamescom, but we didn't have, for example, a specific booth where fans could come and talk to us and stuff like that. It was mostly for business stuff.
There's an event that we've gone to the past couple years, we didn't make it this year, but it's in Atlanta called MomoCon. That's much more of like a fan-based event and it's great going to events like that and being able to interact directly with fans and talk to them about all kinds of stuff, hear their opinions and everything, and I'm really hoping that sometime in the near future, we're able to get out to those sort of events again and actually meet with people directly, shake people's hands, and like sign stuff, and hear what they have to say, and things like that because it's really kind of encouraging.RPG Site: When I played The Silver Case remaster, it was incredible, but it is a running joke between friends about the typewriter sound. I wish I could turn it off (laughs). Would you like to do more with The Silver Case and The 25th Ward?
Suda51: As far as The Silver Case goes, that's where Grasshopper got its start, and that kind of adventure game in particular, is also where we got our start, and that's one of the kinds of games that we feel we are sort of really suited for, those sorts of adventure games in general. That series in particular, that's something that if possible at some point, I think I'd like to go back to and see if there's something else we could do with it. See if there's something we can expand on.
I'd also like to see how younger players would feel about the game, and the kind of ideas that some of the younger members here at Grasshopper would have to create another game in that series. That's definitely something that again, if possible, I would like to go back to, and expand on at some point.RPG Site: What are your favorite Nintendo Switch 2 games?
Suda51: I'd probably have to say Donkey Kong Bananza. I haven't cleared all the DLC yet, but I have cleared the main game itself. That would be my favorite.Advertisement. Keep scrolling for moreRPG Site: What does a day in your life look like right now?
Suda51: Recently, it's pretty much the same cycle each week, each day. I usually get up around 6:00 a.m. and do some things around the house first. I usually get to work sometime between about 9:00 a.m. and 10:00 a.m. I usually stay till about 4:00 p.m. Sometimes I'm there till around 6. After I get back home, I’m working via email and messenger.
While I'm at work, sometimes I'm working at my desk, but especially recently, I've just had like a pretty large amount of meetings. So, the majority of my day at work is usually in one of the meeting rooms with my iPad. Just getting various work things taken care of while I'm doing meetings and stuff, and going into the next meeting with my iPad, continuing to do work, attending another meeting. It's pretty much kind of an unending cycle of that.
Fridays, I work remotely from home, Monday through Thursday, same cycle pretty much every day.
Also to add on to that, I usually try not to eat lunch. I worry about getting sleepy if I eat in the afternoon, so I try to eat a good hearty breakfast and a good hearty dinner. I usually don't eat lunch. But, in our office, there are two food trucks that come by every day, and sometimes I see the food trucks and I'm like,"Oh, actually that looks really good. Okay, okay, maybe just this one time, you know." And I've especially got a real weakness for stuff like pork. I do try my best to avoid eating lunch, but sometimes it just looks so good. I'm like,"Okay, just can't take it. I'm going to have to dive into it this time.RPG Site: Do you know who Wario64 is? Is he a bot?
Suda51: For some reason, a lot of people tend to ask me about Wario64. I'm not really sure why. This is something I believe I've mentioned once or twice before in an interview, but back when E3 was still going on, once at one of the E3s, someone whom I’d never seen before came up to me and asked, "What do you think of Wario64?" So I asked him, "Are you Wario64?" The dude just kind of turned around and ran like literally ran away. (laughs) That could mean a number of things, so I'm not 100% sure. But to this day, I feel like I'm pretty sure that was probably the guy. But otherwise, I can't say with certainty whether it was him or not. All I know is that he's definitely not a bot.
RPG Site: Does he work at Grasshopper?
Suda51: Probably not. I doubt that. (laughs)RPG Site: For my final question, how do you like your coffee? Go into as much detail as possible.
Suda51: Recently, I've become unable to drink coffee properly. It upsets my stomach. But sometimes at home, I do technically sort of drink coffee, but what I do is I get the hot water and the powdered instant coffee. I'll just put like 10 little bits of that into the hot water. So it's not proper coffee, but it's just brown and it smells like coffee, and it's just this really vaguely coffee-flavored hot water, but that's pretty much as far as I can go without upsetting my stomach these days.
RPG Site: Now, how do you think the following characters would drink their coffee: Kamui Uehara, Midori Midorikawa, Sylvia, Shinobu, Travis, Sumio Mondo, and Wario64.
Suda51: For Kamui, it would definitely be really thick black coffee, but it might be decaffeinated.
For Midori, probably caramel macchiato.
For Sylvia, she'd be conscious about her health. So, for health reasons, she'd probably be drinking like an organic latte, but instead of using milk, she'd probably be using almond milk with two shots in it. She'd probably add a little bit of citrus syrup into it as well.
Shinobu probably isn't really into coffee. She'd probably drink kombucha.
Travis would probably be drinking hella sugar and milk. Super sweet. Probably six sugars and about a third milk.
Sumio Mondo probably drinks, rather than coffee, like Japanese tea or English breakfast tea. He will drink coffee sometimes, but he doesn't really have much of a preference for coffee. I can picture him walking around with a pot of coffee, like the really kind of super bitter, nasty, shitty kind, that you get like in some old diner or something like that. That's the kind of coffee he would drink if he were to drink it.
And Wario64? I'm thinking he loves Starbucks Frappuccinos, so it would be a Frappuccino with a couple shots in it, and usually like the seasonal types that they bring out. He'd have them made with lots of extra whipped cream.
RPG Site: So what I'm going to do for this is actually ask Wario64 how he likes his coffee and put it in the interview since I talk to him often.
Suda51: Could you ask him: that dude that I met at E3 that one time, was that really you or not? (laughs)
Editor's note: Wario64 told me he likes his coffee black.
Following the launch of Romeo is a Dead Man, I had a chance to interview Goichi "Suda51" Suda about his career, Romeo is a Dead Man, potential remaster projects, life before the games industry, multiplatform launches, the "Sudaverse", returning characters, game development at Grasshopper Manufacture, physical releases, where Romeo for Switch 2 is, movie recommendations, coffee, Wario64, and much more. This interview was done on a call with Grasshopper Manufacture's James Mountain and Daisuke Koyama helping out with interpretation. It has been slightly edited for clarity.
Advertisement. Keep scrolling for moreRPG Site: Tell us a little bit about yourself and what you do.Goichi "Suda51" Suda: This is Suda, CEO of Grasshopper Manufacture. Right now, on top of running the company, I'm also in the middle of setting up a few things that we're working on for the future as well. New titles and stuff.RPG Site: Is it true that before you joined the games industry, you were an undertaker?
Suda51: Yeah, I actually worked in the funeral business, specifically at a crematorium and a flower shop just before I joined the game industry.RPG Site: Looking back at Grasshopper's early days, you had a lot of games on PlayStation consoles and Nintendo handhelds. So many publishers and companies are doing legacy collections and remasters. I was wondering if you would like to do a Suda51 or say a "Grasshopper Classics Collection" if you had the opportunity?
Suda51: It would be cool to be able to put something like that out. I think if I were to put out something like a "Suda51 Classics Collection" or something like that, it would probably consist of the games that I worked on before I started Grasshopper, when I was at the company called Human.
I was involved in the development of about five games altogether at the time. The only issue or the main issue with that is that the rights for those games are kind of all over the place. So, it would probably be pretty difficult to get it done. But, if I was able to, that would definitely be something that would be cool to try out sometime.RPG Site: Before we get into more Grasshopper, I'm curious about how you feel about the Fire Pro series right now.
Suda51: Regarding Fire Pro, as you probably know, it was my debut title in the game industry. Before that, I was just a gamer. It was once I got into Human, and made Fire Pro, that I really actually jumped into the game industry. So it's a title and a series that means a lot to me because of that.
The series itself was already pretty well known at the time for not just being a simple pro wrestling game. It was more of a pro wrestling game that really sort of captured the Super Nintendo or Super Famicom culture back in the day. You could use the four player adapter thing to play, you know, tag matches with up to four people. It was a really interesting take on pro wrestling and pro wrestling games. It was also kind of considered to be like a good party game at the time, too, since you know, you could play with multiple people and stuff.
Everybody from elementary school students up through adults seem to really enjoy it. It was a great game, great series. When I first joined the industry and started working on Fire Pro, I was really happy that I was able to work on that game. When I worked on the second game, Fire Pro Special, I got to work on the - at the time - newly added story mode and since it's not only my debut title, but also just a great series in general, I'm really kind of proud of that and I really look back on it fondly.RPG Site: It has been a few years now. Well, more than a few years, since the pandemic has sort of changed how the passage of time feels. How do you view Grasshopper itself as a company and how it has grown in recent years?
Suda51: The past five or six years especially, as you mentioned, with the pandemic and everything, have brought a lot of changes to Grasshopper in a lot of ways. For one thing, we moved out of the GungHo group and joined the NetEase group, and then we became independent once again. We were able to bring back and continue the No More Heroes series - which is, as you know, one of the biggest and most important IPs for us – with Travis Strikes Again: No More Heroes and No More Heroes III.
A lot of things, not only in society as a whole, but within the company itself changed. So yeah, it's been one of the most, I guess you could say, change-filled periods in our company's history so far.Advertisement. Keep scrolling for moreRPG Site: Before Romeo is a Dead Man, most of your games debuted on one platform, then probably got a port, and eventually saw more ports or remasters and stuff. Romeo is a Dead Man is the first multiplatform launch in a long time. It also got a worldwide simultaneous multiplatform release. How does it feel for the studio to have finally done that for such a big title?
Suda51: It's not that we intend to have these kinds of staggered releases. Now that you mention it, thinking back on it, it does tend to happen with our games a lot. Not necessarily on purpose, but we have had games where it's like, okay, first it's going to be out on the Switch and then it'll be out on something else and something else.
With Romeo, we were able to put it out on multiple platforms at the same time, as you mentioned. I'm really glad that we were able to get it out all at the same time. I'm really glad we were able to get it out at all, but honestly, it was pretty difficult. It was pretty rough mainly because this time, we self-published it. With that I really got a sense of how hard it is not only for publishers, but especially for a dev to publish their own game. There were a lot of difficulties, a lot of hurdles to overcome and stuff. While being really happy that we were able to get everything out all at once, again, it was pretty hard getting it done.
RPG Site: Did you have any specific publishing help? I know you self-published, but did you have any help from Microsoft and Sony on the console versions?
Suda51: Yeah, for PlayStation, for example, they had us on their State of Play. They let us show it off there. But in general, both Sony and Microsoft helped us out a lot kind of in the background. Sorting things out, making sure everything was on track.RPG Site: When I played Travis Strikes Again: No More Heroes, thinking back to the reveal, there were a lot of fans who were disappointed that it wasn't "No More Heroes 3," but then when you play it, and if you've played Grasshopper games or Suda51 games, you know it's the real deal. It was a fantastic game. Then No More Heroes 3 came out of course, which was the actual numbered sequel. Romeo is a Dead Man, despite not being an old IP, still feels like a proper Grasshopper Manufacture game. It's not a small scale project either, but a full big game. What do you think defines a Grasshopper game?
Suda51: That's a tough one. It's a really hard question. I get asked this sometimes, but what exactly defines a Grasshopper game? In some ways, a Grasshopper game is similar to any other game. You start out with like, a game design document, we've got the basic idea for “okay, we want to make this kind of game,” but pretty much after that, a lot of our development process, it tends to work, a lot differently from the way it works in a lot of other companies.
We have a lot of what I guess you could call “ad lib development” going on. Instead of just having one guy like me, or somebody else sit down and say, "Okay, this is the kind of game we're going to make. Make this game. You do this. You do this. You do this," we have lots of meetings and we all sit there and kind of bounce ideas back and forth off each other, and brainstorm, and be like, "Oh, yeah, that sounds cool. Let's put that in or okay, we tried this but it didn't really work so hey let's try to tweak it this way and kind of make it like this instead. Oh yeah, that sounds cool. Let's do that!" A lot of the decisions for how the final product comes out and how the game ends up looking and feeling and playing, are made during these semi-casual meetings.
Again, just a bunch of dudes working on a game, just kind of riffing on each other, and coming up with ideas and just on the spot. "Yeah, that sounds cool. We will do it just because it sounds like it's going to be fun regardless of how easy or difficult it might be to actually implement. And of course, once we get into the actual implementation stage, we have to make some tough judgment calls.
I think when you play the games, especially with something like Romeo, I think a lot of people can tell that this is a big mixture of a bunch of stuff. It's not just one guy. There are clearly a bunch of people involved in the creation of this game, a bunch of people had input, and luckily the people that we have working on this stuff, and the ideas that we get, luckily they seem to tend to come together really well and mesh really well together. I think that feeling that there are definitely a bunch of people working on this, and everything was sort of thrown together, not in a lazy way, but just in kind of like an ad-libbed off-the-cuff way, I think maybe that's one of the things that makes a Grasshopper game a Grasshopper game.
But, running Grasshopper myself, it's kind of hard to look at it objectively, but that's how I feel.RPG Site: A lot of creators reference some of their older projects in new ones, but with Grasshopper, you kind of expect it at this point and all the fans love it. I remember when I got Romeo for review, in the first 15 minutes, I had like five things I wanted to potentially bring up if I ever got this interview opportunity. What do you think of the "Suda51 connected universe" which is what some fans call it now?
Suda51: Are you familiar with the Japanese manga artist, who is pretty much the “God of Manga”, named Osamu Tezuka?
RPG Site: No.
Suda51: You may not know that he had what was called the Star System which is basically sort of the same thing, like recently, a lot of things are known as something-verse or the something universe. His work was the first work that I encountered that incorporated something like that.
What he would do is instead of having the same characters appear in different works, he treated his characters more like actors where you would have a character in one work, and another work that would look the same, but they would be called something else, or they would have different personalities.
Conversely, you might have two characters who look different or are called something else, but it was clearly the same personality, same manner of speaking, and stuff like that. I always thought that was really cool, and that was a really cool and interesting approach to creating stuff like manga, anime, games, and everything. I wouldn't say that when I make games I'm thinking that I have to make this like the Star System or anything like that.
It's just that as I started making games, that influence from Tezuka's Star System was there, but it's not so much that I'm conscious of that and thinking "Okay, I got to make this like the Star System" or "I have to make this like a Suda-verse". It just sort of came naturally to me in the way that I write, and the way that I think up ideas for games. It's just something that kind of tends to happen when I create stories and think about how to use different characters, and these things just pop up when I'm making a game. I'll be like, "Oh, actually, yeah, this character would be a really good fit here, but it would be even better if I changed them like this."
Like I said earlier, these days you have a lot of Something-verse or Something Universe things whatever, but for me, the OG would be Osamu Tezuka's Star System.RPG Site: That actually leads into my next question nicely. You have Midori Midorikawa, but then in Romeo is a Dead Man, she's GreenRiver. Was that also because of this Star System philosophy? The second question i have on this is why does she hate the color green?
Suda51: Regarding Midori Midorikawa, my memory is a bit foggy on exactly where everything came from, and how it came together, but basically she's a member of the Space-Time Police. In my head at least, she's always been connected to the Space-Time Police. Back in The Silver Case, there were two guys named Aoyama and Akama, which in Japanese incorporate the words blue and red.
I always had this thing, this kind of I guess mini system that I was thinking of where we'd have like red and blue and green kind of tied together somehow. Anyway, as far as I'm concerned, that's where she got her start. She's always been somehow connected to the Space-Time Police. For Romeo, I decided to have her use a sort of alias in the game. I mean, it's not exactly an alias because “Midorikawa” literally means “green river”, but it’s similar to an alias.
Also, as for why she hates the color green, for one thing, it's in her name. I mean, it's in her name twice, so she gets kind of tired of it because of that. Also, in her character settings in my head, she, uh, she's got this, uh, this quirk about her she hates vegetables in general. You know, there are some people in the real world who can't eat food for certain reasons. So on top of disliking vegetables, she also can't eat green foods. All that stuff put together makes her just have this kind of aversion to the color green.RPG Site: It was obviously a challenge getting Romeo on PlayStation, Xbox, and Steam with multiple hardware configurations day one. You've spoken about the Switch 2 version in the past in passing. Can you give me a status update on that? Is it still happening soon?
Suda51: As you said, I'd mentioned before a couple times about wanting to do a Switch 2 version. It is something that we've really been wanting to do. We talked to a number of companies about getting the porting and the package version done, and everything. For a while it was looking like things were going pretty well. Unfortunately, most of those ended up falling through for one reason or another. It's still something that we hope to be able to get out there.
We'd really like to get Romeo on Nintendo hardware. What we feel we need to focus on first, is getting a physical version at all. So if we were going to do the Switch 2 version, it would probably be after we're able to get some sort of physical version out.
Another thing is since the Romeo IP belongs to NetEase Games, it's not just us. We can't just make the decision on our own. We're going to continue talking with NetEase and we're going to continue talking with some of the companies with whom we're still in discussions. It's not that it's just been canceled or anything. We do want to try to get it out somehow. That's pretty much how the situation is at the moment and that's all that I can really say about it at this point.
As Grasshopper, we really do want to do the physical version and the Switch 2 version. We really want to get it out there. We have a deep understanding of how important physical media is, especially these days. If we got the okay, we could probably actually get it done pretty quickly. We're doing everything that we can to convince all related parties, "Yes, this is a good idea. This is what we want. This is what people want, so let us do it." We're trying to do whatever we can to make that happen.RPG Site: One thing I appreciate a lot based on your interviews and when you talk about your games, is you always talk about the people you work with. Even though some people assume Suda51 does everything, you always bring up folks like Ren Yamazaki and such. How has it been working with these folks for so long?
Suda51: To be honest, the way indie games and stuff are these days, if I decided to, I might be able to make a game all by myself, like a small indie game or something. But that's not how we make games here at Grasshopper. That's not how it is for most companies.
As you said, there are a lot of people working on the game, a lot of people who I work with together, and the reason that we're able to make the games that we make, is definitely not just because of my own work alone. It's because of all these people that we have working together. We've got some really great people that we work with both in and out of the company. All their skills and all the things that they're really proficient in, everybody bringing that together and working together, is how our games get made.
When making a game, I’m not really the kind of person who is like, "Okay this is the kind of game I want to make. This is how it's going to be done." Well, there was a time when I sort of was, but... I prefer to get everybody’s opinions since I know that the people I'm working with are really good at what they do.
I prefer to get everyone's input and take advantage of the skills and proficiencies that people have. I think that's how we're able to make the best games possible. I always want to make sure to show respect for the rest of my team and our collaborators as opposed to just trying to take credit for it, or allowing other people to simply give me credit. That's basically the way I felt about game development ever since I started out. That's one thing that I strive to always remember: having a lot of respect for the people that I work with, and for the people who help me, and help us to get these games done.Advertisement. Keep scrolling for moreRPG Site: When you did the accolades trailer for Romeo, you used RPG Site's review in it and some others, but you also used some low scores which I found kind of funny. How does it feel to have such a spread of review scores for your work, and also that you are able to showcase both sides of the spectrum in your trailers.
Suda51: To be honest, when we're making each game, we hope that everybody's going to like the game, and we hope to get good scores from everybody. Sometimes it just doesn't work out though, like you said. The games can be pretty divisive. As for the accolades trailer, the reason we made it that way is to be honest, we just kind of felt like, a lot of companies make these accolade trailers and they always put like 10 out of 10, you know, really high scores and everything, but especially when you've got games like ours, we felt that that would just be kind of lame.
We know that there's people out there giving it lower scores, and we know there's people out there who aren't going to like it and appreciate it as much as other people. So let's be honest about this and we got some really good scores, like from you guys, thanks a lot for that. We got some really good scores from some other people as well, but we thought it would be a bit more, I guess you could say, open and honest to put one or two lower scores in there as well.
We also just kind of thought it was funny. So another thing is when you try to do something like that, you try to ask a media outlet who gave you a low score to use their score, a lot of times they're like, "Oh no, please don't use that." Maybe they kind of regret having put the score or they get kind of embarrassed or something when asked.
Whatever the reason is, most of the time they don't like having their scores used like that. This time it was a French outlet, called GameKult, they were the one in the accolades trailer with the lowest score. We asked them, "Hey, is it cool if we use you guys, you know, this is how we're going to use it? Is it cool if we use your score?" And they were like, "Yeah, that's fine." And just totally okayed it. We really appreciated that. We were glad that they were cool with that. GameKult really is an awesome media outlet.
To go off on a bit of a tangent here, we originally wanted to do the same thing for Shadows of the Damned Hella Remastered. We wanted a trailer with all these really good scores and have like a couple shitty scores as well. But at the time our parent company NetEase stopped us. We're glad that we were able to finally get that done this time.
Another thing to add on to that, is when you see an accolade trailer for a game where, you know, it's got all like “10 out of 10” or like “100 points”, whatever. It feels to me like when a little kid gets like 100% on a test at school, and they're like, "Mommy, look, I got 100%." It's just weird and kind of creepy and lame, you know? To be honest, I don't really want to play a game that reminds me of a little kid like that. Everyone says it's perfect. Everyone says it's the greatest thing ever. If there's nothing wrong with it at all, I don't really want to make those games, and I'm not really interested in those. I kind of wanted to emphasize the fact that that's not the kind of game this is. But if our next game gets nothing but high scores and I start bragging about it, please be sure to diss the hell out of us, telling people how lame Suda51 and Grasshopper are!RPG Site: Going back to the references you put in games, I appreciate when you reference certain films, and you had Takashi Miike in No More Heroes 3. I wasn't familiar with him back then, but I have since put a few movies on my watch list. I'm just curious what you would pick as your favorite films he has done and also in general like in the Criterion Closet if you're familiar with how creatives pick out movies there.
Suda51: There's a bunch actually, and to be honest, it kind of depends on my mood on any particular day, how I happen to be feeling. I'd probably start off with a couple different Japanese anime. One reason that I'd like to recommend these to people is because there's a lot of stuff that you can't find on streaming sites, or a lot of stuff that you can't find on like, you know, the anime distribution sites, and stuff like that. There are a couple in particular. One of them is in the Gundam series. It's called Mobile Suit Gundam Char's Counterattack. That's pretty much like a given.
RPG Site: I've watched that. It is great.
Suda51: That's one that everybody's got to see. The next one is called Space Runaway Ideon. It's not as big as Gundam, but that's another great one that I think everyone should watch if possible. The next one would be the movie version of an anime called Cobra. I believe it's full title is Cobra Space Adventure and there's another movie version of another anime called Aim for the Ace! Do you know this one in Japanese? It's a pretty, well-known, and famous anime. It's about tennis, and it's pretty much known as a classic here in Japan, but the movie version of that actually had some pretty heavy influence on parts of No More Heroes. For Aim for the Ace!, there's a team of two guys who work together a lot: director Osamu Dezaki and Akio Sugino, make an amazing team. So their stuff is also something that I'd like to recommend.
There's another one that's out called Mobile Suit Gundam Hathaway. Are you aware of this or have you seen it?
RPG Site: I've not seen it, but it is supposed to be on Netflix so I will watch it there when I can.
Suda51: Be sure to check it out.
Moving away from anime and going back to Takashi Miike, who did Ichi The Killer and Audition, which are pretty popular overseas, I'd say Gozu. That's kind of like the entry point for Takashi Miike movies. Another one of his legendary earlier films is Dead or Alive. If we're talking about pure action films, there are samurai movies like 13 Assassins that are well worth watching. Visitor Q, which depicts family love, also showcases Miike's unique take on the nature of love. (laughs) I could go on for days and days about which movies I'd like to recommend, but I'll keep it to these ones for now.RPG Site: I've lost track of time and forgot it has been 8 years since Travis Strikes Again. I want to give a shout out to two friends who got me deeper into Suda51 games over the years. One is an artist, Geistbox, and one is Dreamboum, who made the Kill The Past Primer. They are both the biggest Suda fans I know. Have you seen their art and posts about your games? Also how is it interacting with fans online and offline at events since you are active on social media.
Suda51: Yeah, I've definitely seen the Kill The Past Primer. It is pretty famous and well-informed. It’s thanks to the passionate support of all the fans like them that we’re able to keep on going, but recently I haven't really had the opportunity to meet and interact directly with fans much like at events and stuff like that. Obviously we've got social media and so I'm able to talk with fans and see what they're saying and discuss things with them sometimes on there when I'm not too busy and everything. Last year we went to gamescom, but we didn't have, for example, a specific booth where fans could come and talk to us and stuff like that. It was mostly for business stuff.
There's an event that we've gone to the past couple years, we didn't make it this year, but it's in Atlanta called MomoCon. That's much more of like a fan-based event and it's great going to events like that and being able to interact directly with fans and talk to them about all kinds of stuff, hear their opinions and everything, and I'm really hoping that sometime in the near future, we're able to get out to those sort of events again and actually meet with people directly, shake people's hands, and like sign stuff, and hear what they have to say, and things like that because it's really kind of encouraging.RPG Site: When I played The Silver Case remaster, it was incredible, but it is a running joke between friends about the typewriter sound. I wish I could turn it off (laughs). Would you like to do more with The Silver Case and The 25th Ward?
Suda51: As far as The Silver Case goes, that's where Grasshopper got its start, and that kind of adventure game in particular, is also where we got our start, and that's one of the kinds of games that we feel we are sort of really suited for, those sorts of adventure games in general. That series in particular, that's something that if possible at some point, I think I'd like to go back to and see if there's something else we could do with it. See if there's something we can expand on.
I'd also like to see how younger players would feel about the game, and the kind of ideas that some of the younger members here at Grasshopper would have to create another game in that series. That's definitely something that again, if possible, I would like to go back to, and expand on at some point.RPG Site: What are your favorite Nintendo Switch 2 games?
Suda51: I'd probably have to say Donkey Kong Bananza. I haven't cleared all the DLC yet, but I have cleared the main game itself. That would be my favorite.Advertisement. Keep scrolling for moreRPG Site: What does a day in your life look like right now?
Suda51: Recently, it's pretty much the same cycle each week, each day. I usually get up around 6:00 a.m. and do some things around the house first. I usually get to work sometime between about 9:00 a.m. and 10:00 a.m. I usually stay till about 4:00 p.m. Sometimes I'm there till around 6. After I get back home, I’m working via email and messenger.
While I'm at work, sometimes I'm working at my desk, but especially recently, I've just had like a pretty large amount of meetings. So, the majority of my day at work is usually in one of the meeting rooms with my iPad. Just getting various work things taken care of while I'm doing meetings and stuff, and going into the next meeting with my iPad, continuing to do work, attending another meeting. It's pretty much kind of an unending cycle of that.
Fridays, I work remotely from home, Monday through Thursday, same cycle pretty much every day.
Also to add on to that, I usually try not to eat lunch. I worry about getting sleepy if I eat in the afternoon, so I try to eat a good hearty breakfast and a good hearty dinner. I usually don't eat lunch. But, in our office, there are two food trucks that come by every day, and sometimes I see the food trucks and I'm like,"Oh, actually that looks really good. Okay, okay, maybe just this one time, you know." And I've especially got a real weakness for stuff like pork. I do try my best to avoid eating lunch, but sometimes it just looks so good. I'm like,"Okay, just can't take it. I'm going to have to dive into it this time.RPG Site: Do you know who Wario64 is? Is he a bot?
Suda51: For some reason, a lot of people tend to ask me about Wario64. I'm not really sure why. This is something I believe I've mentioned once or twice before in an interview, but back when E3 was still going on, once at one of the E3s, someone whom I’d never seen before came up to me and asked, "What do you think of Wario64?" So I asked him, "Are you Wario64?" The dude just kind of turned around and ran like literally ran away. (laughs) That could mean a number of things, so I'm not 100% sure. But to this day, I feel like I'm pretty sure that was probably the guy. But otherwise, I can't say with certainty whether it was him or not. All I know is that he's definitely not a bot.
RPG Site: Does he work at Grasshopper?
Suda51: Probably not. I doubt that. (laughs)RPG Site: For my final question, how do you like your coffee? Go into as much detail as possible.
Suda51: Recently, I've become unable to drink coffee properly. It upsets my stomach. But sometimes at home, I do technically sort of drink coffee, but what I do is I get the hot water and the powdered instant coffee. I'll just put like 10 little bits of that into the hot water. So it's not proper coffee, but it's just brown and it smells like coffee, and it's just this really vaguely coffee-flavored hot water, but that's pretty much as far as I can go without upsetting my stomach these days.
RPG Site: Now, how do you think the following characters would drink their coffee: Kamui Uehara, Midori Midorikawa, Sylvia, Shinobu, Travis, Sumio Mondo, and Wario64.
Suda51: For Kamui, it would definitely be really thick black coffee, but it might be decaffeinated.
For Midori, probably caramel macchiato.
For Sylvia, she'd be conscious about her health. So, for health reasons, she'd probably be drinking like an organic latte, but instead of using milk, she'd probably be using almond milk with two shots in it. She'd probably add a little bit of citrus syrup into it as well.
Shinobu probably isn't really into coffee. She'd probably drink kombucha.
Travis would probably be drinking hella sugar and milk. Super sweet. Probably six sugars and about a third milk.
Sumio Mondo probably drinks, rather than coffee, like Japanese tea or English breakfast tea. He will drink coffee sometimes, but he doesn't really have much of a preference for coffee. I can picture him walking around with a pot of coffee, like the really kind of super bitter, nasty, shitty kind, that you get like in some old diner or something like that. That's the kind of coffee he would drink if he were to drink it.
And Wario64? I'm thinking he loves Starbucks Frappuccinos, so it would be a Frappuccino with a couple shots in it, and usually like the seasonal types that they bring out. He'd have them made with lots of extra whipped cream.
RPG Site: So what I'm going to do for this is actually ask Wario64 how he likes his coffee and put it in the interview since I talk to him often.
Suda51: Could you ask him: that dude that I met at E3 that one time, was that really you or not? (laughs)
Editor's note: Wario64 told me he likes his coffee black.