Anarchy in the GDC

Grasshopper founder Goichi Suda, better known to gamers as Suda 51, was the man behind one of GDC 2007's final presentations, "Punk's Not Dead." The seminar was designed by Suda to give an overview not only of Grasshopper's beginnings, but also of the developer's completely Do-It-Yourself ethic, which any punk worth his or her salt could appreciate.

Donning a pink Kurt Cobain t-shirt, Suda opened up his session with a background on himself and his start in the industry. Working for the now-defunct HUMAN, Inc, he cut his teeth behind the scenes on such franchises as Super Fire Pro Wrestling. When the developer closed its doors, Suda went on to found Grasshopper in 1998. Suda then ran a six minute-long video showing off the company's portfolio.


The developer's first game, The Silver Case for PlayStation, was a hit in Japan, although it was never localized for Western audiences. From there, Grasshopper went on to make Flower, Sun, and Rain, which again was only released in Japan, but seemed to evoke a visual style eventually realized for Western audiences in Killer 7. After FS&R, Grasshopper diverted to a completely different genre with the Shining Soul RPGs for GBA. From there, the developer went on to create the game that it's most known for in the West, the controversial Killer 7. Since then, Grasshopper has produced licensed titles such as Samurai Champloo: Sidetracked and the DS cult hit Contact.

With that, Suda finished discussing the history of the company and went on to explaining his core philosophy, which emulates the DIY mentality found in the music industry. Programming, script writing, visuals, and sound are all done in-house with small teams. One of Grasshopper's slogans is "Let's Punk," and by that, he explained that too many games in Japan are simply rip-offs of other peoples' ideas. The developer's attitude is one of originality and vision, at all costs.

He also revealed that the concepts that drove The Silver Case found their way into Killer 7. As Silver Case had several interweaving storylines, so did Killer 7. He displayed a slide demonstrating that the games were fundamentally rooted in the same concept. The ideas lay in both games' eclectic tendencies, the angle of the camera and player movement (he cited his non-gaming friends as a motivation for the simplified on-rails movement of K7), and the "FilmWindowEngine," which he diagrammed in a highly technical slide. Animation also plays an important role, and Suda note that he emphasizes the use of the in-game engine rather than pre-rendered cutscenes.