A new interview with Yu Suzuki at Gamescom emerged. (9Lives.be)
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Portrait of Yu Suzuki, the game legend that forces a comeback with Shenmue III
With Shenmue III, somewhere in the market next year, legendary game designer Yu Suzuki returns from the Limbo of mobile games to finally make a title with some scale. Who is this person, and why is his comeback such a big deal? A portrait.
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It is 1985, and a 27-year-old Yu Suzuki undertakes a car trip through Europe. The journey starts in Frankfurt, but takes him further to places like the Romantic Road in Germany, the Swiss Alps, the French Riviera, Florence, Rome, and the Trevi Fountain. The visual impressions he gains there will form the basis for Out Run (1986) for him an ode to the romantic road trip, for the audience of young people who are in luna parks around the red, pneumariate-set Ferrari shears a piece youth sentiment under construction. " A game designer has to open his eyes and ears so that he can bring up the impressions he gains in the world of the game he makes ," Suzuki says now more than thirty years later. "About eighty percent of everything I make is based on my own experiences."
Continuation
Patches from that life of the now 59-year-old game designer will be encountered again in Shenmue III, a third episode of the kung fu-eighties-rpg epic that Suzuki started on the Sega Dreamcast in 1999, especially after the second game. from 2001 became a culthit. A lot of fans stayed until today, sixteen years later, waiting for a successor, Suzuki says. "That is also the main reason why I did not just put my shoulders under something completely new: the many fans who are still there for Shenmue, and who asked me in online forums to finish this story. And so I did the latter . "
Despite the more than sixteen years between the releases of Shenmue III and the previous episode, the game picks up the events of Suzuki's saga almost immediately in 1987. Ryo Hazuki, the late teen from the previous games who is looking for the his father's murderer, migrates to the mountains of Guilin, China. Where he meets Ling Shenhua, the mysterious girl that appears in his dreams. His quest proves to be in touch with hers: a legend from her village already predicted that their paths of life would intersect. In the meantime, he keeps in touch with characters from the previous games via the telephone, who are still in Japan.
Shenmue III is a continuation of a multi-game spanning story that Suzuki already had in his head twenty years ago, he says: it was only because of circumstances that it never went beyond two episodes. Even the themes of Shenmue III remain more or less the same, says Suzuki: " Romance, friendship, adventure. And kung fu. The usual combinations of a Shenmue story. "
Comeback
Yu Suzuki's star started a decade ago within the ranks of Sega, the video gamer in which he grew up. But his influence on the video game medium as we know it is undeniable. We already talked about Out Run, but in the late 80's and early 90's his name featured more big games from the luna park: with the graphically powerful internal hardware that Suzuki designed for those games, and the system of hydraulic pumps that caused the arcades to move, he gave Hang-On, Out Run, Space Harrier and After Burner a completely new élan to the category of arcade cabinets that was already waning. A few years later, he again pioneered, this time in 3D graphics, with games such as Virtua Cop, Virtua Fighter and Virtua Racing for the Sega Saturn, Sega Dreamcast and the luna carpets from the Japanese manufacturer.
"A game designer has to open his eyes and ears."
When Sega gave him carte blanche at the end of the 90s to develop a big title for the Dreamcast, Suzuki seized the opportunity to start his magnum opus with the first Shenmue. But the market conditions decided differently: the Dreamcast became almost Sega's Titanic, and Suzuki was put on less ambitious projects. At the beginning of the decade he made some worthwhile sequels on games that he himself had helped launch, including Virtua Fighter 4 (2001) and Out Run 2: Coast 2 Coast (2003), but the time of big new things was over. Suzuki's and Sega's roads separated from each other in 2011, and Suzuki went into a sort of subcontracting deal from his own company Ys Net to make mobile versions of Segatitels until he announced the production of Shenmue III two years ago through a Kickstart campaign.
The grandmaster started back at the bottom of the ladder. " I have researched various opportunities to finance Shenmue III, " says Suzuki. " But a Kickstart campaign seemed like the best. It was also hard for us to find a good partner. And we saw the enormous momentum of fans who were still interested in the game. Then I decided to use that power to get the project going again. "
Much changed
In the meantime, the project also found shelter with a new publisher, the German Koch Media. Everything is ready to put the game on the market in 2018. During that very turbulent period, Suzuki also discovered how firmly the medium has changed. Not only the landscape of video game companies looks very different than just a decade ago, when he recorded his last small successes under the Sega flag: the way in which games are made is also very different.
" The arrival of game engines, which are central to development today, has changed a lot, " says Suzuki. "And that is for the most part good: you can analyze everything you want in terms of gameplay much better, quickly create a prototype in which you try small details. But for someone who has been working for a while, it is quite a change: I have to retrain myself to learn to think in that new way. At the time of the first two Shenmue's I wrote all the code myself, and I could quickly check things myself. With the advent of engines, the programming work can be done by a whole team, but that also means that I have to stop a whole process when something does not quite suit me. It has its advantages and disadvantages. But especially advantages. "
With these modern means, a game is still being made that takes place in the 1980s, an era that was deep in the past at the time of the first Shenmue, in 1999. But for Suzuki, himself a late twenties to a young man in the Eighties, the last important stories were told at the time. " With the Shenmue games, I wanted to tell a story about the older eras, when the character of people was even more important than anything else," says Suzuki. "The 80s were the last years of that old time with which today's players still have points of contact. Everything changed afterwards: before the arrival of the modern technology that is waving today, everyone was still largely the same, because we all got the same information. The charm of that era, its innocence in a sense, is for me a never-ending source of inspiration. "