When Goichi Suda, alias Suda51, appears on our monitor screen, he’s sitting inside the cockpit of a Boeing Super Hornet. He isn’t actually flying it, of course; rather, he’s chosen the fighter jet from Top Gun: Maverick as his Zoom background for the call. It’s a typically Suda sort of entrance, and naturally we take the opportunity to ask a man who likes to keep his finger on the pulse of popular culture whether he’s seen the film. Not yet, he replies – but having just received a PSVR2 headset, he’s looking forward to watching it in VR. We think he’ll enjoy it, we say, and after his translator has relayed that message, he grins and gives us a thumbs-up.
As the founder, CEO and creative figurehead of Grasshopper Manufacture, Suda’s leisure time might be at something of a premium these days – enough, evidently, that he hasn’t yet seen one of the biggest blockbusters of recent times – but then it’s apparent that he’s still enjoying making videogames too much to care. On March 30, Grasshopper celebrates a significant milestone: it’s been 25 years since Suda founded the company, originally situated in Tokyo’s Suginami ward, now headquartered in Chiyoda (though Suda himself is calling in from Osaka). The studio has withstood some turbulent times, particularly prior to its acquisition by Puzzle & Dragons publisher GungHo Online Entertainment in 2013 – but also during development of Let It Die, when the majority of the studio’s staff was appointed to work on GungHo properties, with Suda retaining managerial control of a smaller team which continued to work independently on its own projects. But it has survived, by and large, by sticking to its guns: rather than pursuing trends, Grasshopper has pretty much always made the games it wanted to make.
Even its best-known titles – The Silver Case, Killer7, No More Heroes – have hardly been mega-hits, but that hasn’t prevented publishers from knocking at Suda’s door. Indeed, China’s NetEase Games acquired the studio in late 2021 in a deal that involves plans for at least three major releases over the next ten years. And it’s happy to let Grasshopper continue to do what it does best. “Making sure that each title is a commercial success is definitely not at the forefront of our ideas when we’re coming up with games,” Suda tells us. “While it’s something that we do technically keep in mind, it’s definitely more about making the games that we want to make, and giving off that sort of counterculture punk feel.”
What’s your overriding emotion as you reach this milestone? Did you ever think when you founded Grasshopper Manufacture in 1998 that the company would still be here, a quarter of a century on?
Actually, when I first started the company, what I had in mind was what’s called a hundred-year company. Basically, the kind of company that would last a whole century – where, even after I
