During our trip to PAX East this year, I was fortunate enough to get some time to speak with legendary video game director and writer Goichi Suda—more commonly known by his alias Suda51—who was visiting Boston by way of Japan for the event. On display at the Grasshopper booth were several comfy demo areas for his upcoming title Shadows of the Damned: Hella Remastered, originally released back in 2011. The interview was conducted one-on-one with the help of Suda’s translator James, where I inquired about his creative inspirations, raunchy humor, and what it would be like to work on existing IP.
KP: How are you enjoying PAX so far and Boston?
S51: It’s my fourth time here actually!
KP: It’s my first!
S51: Everyone here is a bunch of gamers, and getting to actually meet everyone in real life and in close quarters is pretty cool. From back in the day, even before E3, Tokyo Game Show, and all that other stuff, PAX has always been my favorite event.
KP: Yeah, I love it here, for my first time it’s been a lot of fun. So, what made you want to return to Shadows of the Damned?
S51: I’ve been wanting to do a remaster for a long time. I originally talked to EA about it years ago, and they said okay that’s cool, but it’s gonna have to be on Origin. One of the main reasons I wanted to do a remaster is because when the game came out originally, I felt that it didn’t really reach as wide of an audience as it could have. A lot of people either knew about it but never really got a chance to play it or never even found out about it in the first place. But it’s a game that I’ve always wanted to bring again to a wider audience so they can know about it and enjoy it. So when they said ‘you can put it on Origin if you want’, if that’s the case, then I’ll just pass for now. But as time went by, and the Origin deal became no longer an issue, I spoke to EA again. We worked everything out, and they were extremely cooperative and helpful. I basically decided that since I can put this out on other platforms now, I’m going to do it.
KP: That’s awesome. I played the demo here, it’s very fun, but I also found it very funny—it’s very humorous, it made me laugh.
S51: Oh, thank you!
KP: Do you like writing raunchy humor, or “dick jokes”, I guess?
S51: [laughter] Some of the dick jokes in the game I wrote myself, but a lot of the more “dicky” dick jokes I guess were actually additions by the director Massimo Guarini. So a lot of the more raunchy humor that’s in the game is not something I have any problem with, but it came from Massimo’s sense of humor.
KP: Oh okay, I was also wondering if it came from maybe a localization team. Do they kind of finesse it a bit?
S51: No, the localization team didn’t actually have anything to really do with it. Conversely, I was actually kind of worried at the time about whether the localization would even work out at all. So mostly it was partly me, and partly the director.
KP: Oh that’s really interesting—what was your biggest inspiration with Shadows of the Damned when you were writing it? Was there any movie or any game or any piece of media that inspired you when making it?
S51: Ohh… it’s been such a long time so I’m trying to wrack my brain to remember, but one thing I remember is– you know the movie Legend, with Tom Cruise?
KP: Legend… I haven’t seen it, but my girlfriend loves it. She’s like ‘you gotta watch Legend’, so I hear it’s great.
S51: Yeah, I saw Legend a while ago before I was writing the game, and I felt that I wanted to do something with a mysterious vibe like Legend. It’s kind of mysterious and it’s kind of dark like that, and as I started writing it out, it just kinda got more and more… naughty, I guess you could say.
KP: Oh okay, raunchy, right. I was also interested, because growing up I played a lot of No More Heroes on the Wii, and that was a shocking game for that system. When you pitched that to Nintendo to have that on the Wii, did anybody at Nintendo push back and say ‘no, that’s too violent’?
S51: Oh okay, thank you! So, in Japan the publisher was Marvelous, and Nintendo wasn’t really all too involved. In the US, it was published by Ubisoft and they didn’t really have a problem with it. We heard later on, that Nintendo of Europe at least was actually super supportive of it. They saw the game, and they were like ‘this is the kind of game that we want on the Wii, this is something that’s fun’, and they even talked about possibly doing commercials for it, but unfortunately due to various restrictions they weren’t able to. I’m not sure what Nintendo of America or Japan thought of it, but I never really got any shit about it or anything, but conversely in Europe they were like ‘yeah, go for it, man’ and I was super happy to hear that.
KP: Yeah, Wii was a little more family friendly, so it was interesting to see something different on there.
S51: Right, exactly.
KP: Would you ever be interested in writing more for movies, or even television, outside of video games?
S51: I’ve always wanted to try something like that, if the right chance came along, but to be honest, recently everytime I’ve been writing up a scenario for a video game, I have a habit of going way over the deadline all the time.
KP: Me too.
S51: [laughter] For the time being, I’m going to put everything I’ve got into the writing for our games, but writing for TV and movies is definitely something I’ve always been interested in, if the right chance came along.
KP: Yeah, that would be really awesome to see, I hope so. Going back to No More Heroes for a moment, will we ever see number four in the series, or is it complete?
S51: Ah… at the moment, I feel that with No More Heroes 3, I’ve wrapped up the series.
KP: Okay, that makes sense, yeah.
S51: I don’t currently have any plans to do a fourth, and honestly I don’t even know if there will be a fourth. That’s not to say that I’m not going to, it’s just that it’s not really my choice, it’s more of, will Travis come back for me again, you know? Marvelous actually owns the IP, so if I did want to do a fourth, I would have to talk to them anyway. It’s not something to be ruled out completely but if it were to happen it would be pretty far off.
KP: Right, yeah. The final battle in No More Heroes 3, I don’t want to spoil it for anyone who will be reading this later, but the final battle was really, really cool. The reference was very funny, the way they fight at the end was very funny.
S51: Oh, thank you so much!
KP: You’re welcome! Well I guess I’ll ask you one last question: is there an existing video game IP or franchise that you would like to direct or write for? Maybe a violent Sonic the Hedgehog or something like that?
S51: Someday if it’s possible, I would like to try writing for a buddy-style Mario and Bowser road movie type game.
KP: That would be very exciting, I would love to play that. I would absolutely play that.
Shadows of the Damned: Hella Remastered is developed and published by Grasshopper Manufacture, and is set to be released later this year on Steam, Xbox Series X/S, PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5, and Nintendo Switch.
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