Suda51 on 25 years of making strange masterpieces at Grasshopper Manufacture

gamedeveloper.com:

Grasshopper Manufacture, the punk rock video game studio led by CEO and game designer Goichi “Suda51” Suda, turned 25 years old earlier this year. This milestone firmly entrenches Grasshopper as a contemporary of larger and more well-known developers like Valve, Sony Santa Monica, and Retro Studios, which may come as a shock if all you know about the studio is that time Suda revealed a game while sitting on a toilet.

With so much of the game industry suffering from layoffs and closures in recent years, I couldn’t help but be curious how Grasshopper managed to stay afloat for so long. The studio epitomizes the kind of success story you don’t see too often these days—the plucky start-up making instant cult classic video games and, in the process, acquiring a fanbase of ride-or-die devotees—so I went straight to the source for answers on how they pulled it off: Suda51 himself.

My conversation with the mastermind behind Killer7, No More Heroes, and Shadows of the Damned dove headlong into Grasshopper’s “give no fucks” attitude, revealing some of Suda’s long-dormant white whales as well as how the studio’s games have been influenced by filmmakers like Alejandro Jodorowsky and Takashi Miike.

Suda founded Grasshopper Manufacture in 1998 after a stint at the now-defunct Human Entertainment—you may know it as the company behind the survival horror Clock Towerseries. He first made a name for himself penning the controversial story to 1994’s Super Fire Pro Wrestling Special, the conclusion of which sees protagonist Smith Morio die by suicide.

Human Entertainment famously received mountains of hate mail over this shocking ending, but Suda never let the public sentiment affect his work, an ethos that persists at Grasshopper to this day.

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