Suda51 on Switch 2, Twin Peaks, western culture and his favourite beer

It’s always an interesting conversation when Suda51 is around. The Grasshopper Manufacture founder and CEO recently attended MomoCon in Atlanta, Georgia, and VGC was given the opportunity to ask him some questions to mark the visit.

It’s been less than a year since we visited Grasshopper’s new Tokyo headquarters, where we mainly discussed the studio’s acquisition by NetEase and its upcoming projects following the end of the No More Heroes series.

This time, then, while we did still want to discuss future titles, we decided this would also be a good chance to spread the topics a little wider.

The resulting answers, if nothing else, will at least help you decide what to choose if you ever meet Suda in public and want to buy him a pint.

The last time we spoke was in July 2023, when we visited the Grasshopper office in Bunkyō. Back then you dodged our question about making Hotel Barcelona with Swery65, and then when it was announced two months later we realised why!

Now that it’s official, can you tell us a little more about how long it’s been in development, and how much involvement you’ve had in it?

It’s actually White Owls handling all the development for Hotel Barcelona, so you should ask Swery – I’d love to see that interview!

I helped come up with the idea and write some of the scenario stuff, but Swery and his team are doing the actual development and basically handling everything else.

The game’s described as a parody of slasher films (though Swery-san has since said there are a number of horror genres in there). Grasshopper’s games are obviously full of references to popular culture but slasher films maybe haven’t featured so heavily as other things, such as music or wrestling. Which horror films – and which slasher films, especially – would you consider your personal favourites?

Swery would know a lot more about this stuff in relation to Hotel Barcelona than I would. As for myself, I’ve been watching horror and slasher movies since I was a kid.

I’d consider the Scream and I Know What You Did Last Summer series to be some of my favorites, and one that i watched recently that I really liked was Happy Death Day.

Although it may not be so obvious in Hotel Barcelona, it’s clear that Swery-san has great love for Twin Peaks (as seen in his Deadly Premonition games). When we visited the new Grasshopper office last July your love for Twin Peaks was also clear, especially at the reception area.

I understand Twin Peaks was very popular in Japan when it originally aired – what do you think it is about that show in particular that had such an impact on you both? And what did you think of its return in 2017?

I’ve always loved David Lynch’s movies, especially Blue Velvet.

Back before TV shows became more widely available to rent on VHS in Japan, Western shows were always really late to broadcast here, and a lot of them weren’t broadcast here at all and were only viewable on VHS, so we’d wait years for shows sometimes.

There was a show on the weekends called Showbiz Today, and I remember watching it one day and they announced that this new show by David Lynch would be coming out.

I saw the scenes with Cooper finding the little piece of paper with the letter “B” on it under Laura Palmer’s fingernail, and I was just blown away by Kyle MacLachlan’s character and presence and was like, “I need to watch this show!” I’ve loved Twin Peaks ever since.

I used to go to the video store to rent it, and I’d sit there waiting for hours for the volume I wanted to get returned by the previous customer.

As for the 2017 return, it was a pure example of Lynch keeping his (Laura’s) promise of “I’ll see you in 25 years.” I feel he finished off the series and story perfectly, and he really kept his promise to his fans. Some of the visuals in the later series were really amazing. I love both runs of the show.

You’ve also got Shadows of the Damned: Hella Remastered coming later this year. When a cult game like Shadows of the Damned gets a remaster, is there a difficult balance between keeping the existing fans of the original game happy – perhaps by giving them a little something extra they haven’t seen before – while delivering an authentic recreation of the original game for people who are discovering it for the first time?

It’s a simple remaster; nothing big added to the original game. One of the reasons we decided to release it was to help keep the both the game and more generally the whole GhM catalogue alive, to make sure people could still play it.

Of course we’ve added a few extra things to it, but we mainly wanted to keep the game playable for current-generation players, and we want to keep doing this with more of our back catalogue, too.

Obviously Shadows of the Damned was produced by Mikami-san, and it was recently announced that Microsoft is closing down his former studio Tango Gameworks. This is only the latest in a huge line of studio closures and mass layoffs – what’s your current opinion of the state of the games industry?

My opinion on the state of the game industry is that is hasn’t really changed much from how it was before.

20 years ago Microsoft did the mass layoff thing, for example, and it’s not such a rare occurrence. I feel like this is just the industry acting as it usually does.

Microsoft shutting down Tango shows that no studio is truly safe, no matter how impressive its games are. Obviously Grasshopper was previously owned by GungHo and is now owned by NetEase – do you ever worry that being owned by a larger company means that at any time Grasshopper could be closed down by forces out of your control?

Is there extra pressure to deliver on each project knowing that somewhere the sales figures are being analysed?

Well, we joined the NetEase Group because we trust NetEase. I’ve mentioned this before but I want to continue making games together with them for long time – at least ten years, maybe even 20 or more.

NetEase is very supportive of our efforts and they also strive to help us to improve, so honestly I’m not worried about working as part of their group.

It seems that as technology gets more advanced, game development gets more expensive, and as a result games have to sell more copies to be considered profitable.

Do you think we’ll hit a point where studios and publishers agree that budgets have to drop again, for the sake of the industry, or is there too much pressure from players to keep making bigger and more visually impressive games to allow this to happen?

People have been saying this for years. Each successive generation has improved top hardware, and each generation keeps developing technologies to deal with the issues you bring up. We’ve been doing a lot of thinking and looking into this stuff among the NetEase Group.

You recently attended MomoCon, and have come to the west numerous times throughout your career. Obviously Japan and the US are very different culturally in many ways, but how comfortable are you whenever you visit the west? You have a clear love for western culture – does a lifetime of exposure to that make it easier to visit the US and Europe?

I’ve been living in Japan my whole life, and I’ve loved US / European culture since I was younger so I’ve been exposed to a lot of it, but I can’t speak English and I can’t go overseas on my own so I always bring James [Mountain, community manager] or another English-speaking staff member along with me.

Also – and sorry for the not-very-interesting answer, by the way, but – I love being able to go overseas for work like this and am always looking forward to the next trip. Moreso than sightseeing, I actually love going overseas for work, and I also love eating good food and drinking good beer.

I’m always looking for good beer – I particularly love Blue Moon in the US, so I’m constantly looking for it on tap when I go overseas – and I like looking for good pubs in the UK.

Over the years, have you experienced a difference between the way Japanese media and players treat your games, versus the way they’re treated in North America and Europe? Are any particular Grasshopper games more or less popular in a certain region than others, and if so why do you think that is?

This is something that we find out about after release sometimes. The No More Heroes series, Killer7, Lollipop Chainsaw… a lot of our games have different publishers in different regions, and sometimes long after release we’ll be like, “Wow, this game is popular here (in this particular region)?!”

It’s happened several times before, but to be honest I can’t remember which titles it happened with at the moment.

Your appearance at MomoCon this year wasn’t your first. At the 2018 show, you announced the PC version of Killer7.

Although that was six years ago now, do you have any interest in an HD console port of the game? It’s one of Grasshopper’s greatest titles and it’s a shame modern players can’t experience it on Switch, PS5 or Xbox. Does the fact it was published by Capcom make it harder to greenlight a port?

For Killer7, Capcom only okayed the PC version port. We would love to release it on current consoles as well but we would need Capcom’s permission to do that. I really hope to get it done someday.

“For Killer7, Capcom only okayed the PC version port. We would love to release it on current consoles as well but we would need Capcom’s permission to do that. I really hope to get it done someday.”

Back in the days before VGC existed, I interviewed you and asked: “If you were being sent to a desert island and you could only bring five music albums with you, which five would it be?” Your answer was five different albums by The Smiths.

If all The Smiths’ albums in the world were to suddenly disappear, meaning you couldn’t choose them, which five albums would you take instead?

• Joy Division – Closer
• New Order – Music Complete
• David Sylvian – Brilliant Trees
• Morrissey – Viva Hate
• Sakanaction – Sakanaction

It’s well-known that your career started at Human Entertainment where you worked on the Super Fire Pro Wrestling series.

Now that you’ve got so much going on at Grasshopper, do you have time to watch pro wrestling these days, or is life too busy now? If you do still watch wrestling, what are your current observations?

I haven’t actually been watching anything new at all, I mainly just check out whatever pops up on my Twitter/X timeline (mostly videos from back in the day, from the US and Japan back in the 70s/80s, matches with guys like Ric Flair, Hulk Hogan, etc.).

I like watching those old matches when I have the time. It makes me feel super nostalgic, like listening to my old favorite songs.

Finally, Nintendo has just announced that the successor to the Switch will be revealed sometime before the end of March 2025. As someone who was present at the event announcing the Switch, are you currently developing anything for the next console?

As a developer, are there any features you’d like to see in the next system that are currently missing or not good enough in the current Switch?

Just like everyone else, I have no idea what’s coming up. But I’m really looking forward to seeing what they come up with as both a gamer and as a developer.

The Switch is a really successful and all-around great platform so I’d be hard pressed to try to find parts of it that aren’t “good enough”, and it’s done did great things for indie games in particular. I think the Switch is awesome not only for players of all types but for developers of all types as well, especially indie developers

Even now, I still think it’s an amazing platform. I don’t have anything in particular that I can think of as far as new features I want to see in the next-gen iteration of it are concerned, but I’m really looking forward to seeing what Nintendo does with it. They’ve always done revolutionary stuff for software and the video game industry in general.

I’m super excited for the next console, especially since we’re definitely gonna cook for it.