Goichi Suda is a busy man these days, working on titles like Lollipop Chainsaw and Black Knight Sword, but while the ideas mostly come from him, his role with each game varies depending on the project. At the Tokyo Game Show, Suda explained his many different roles at the studio.
Suda told 1UP that for Lollipop Chainsaw, the idea was his and he is the executive director for the game. With Diabolical Pitch and Black Knight Sword, he came up with the idea but turned the games over to different teams, but stays around to offer as much feedback as possible. Sine Mora on the other hand, was an idea by Digital Reality that Suda also offers feedback for.
Suda had the following to say:
Black Knight Story’s original concept is reflected pretty heavily [in the final game]. I had this vision where the main character is a guy who hangs himself trying to die, but he can’t die and he actually gets possessed by this spiritual thing. So I actually wanted him to explore the world to find the three rarest foods in the world, but that doesn’t happen in the game. That was resisted strongly by the director…so that didn’t happen, but other than that, it’s pretty close to the original concept.
Diabolical Pitch, I think it’s kept pretty close to the original idea. You know Randy Johnson, right? I really like him. I originally wanted Randy Johnson to do the motion capture, and I also wanted to put this pitching style that [a legendary Japanese pitcher] had, but that didn’t really happen. But other than that, I think we’re pretty close to the original concept.
Grasshopper currently houses 120 employees and, while they may not wear the amount of hats that Suda does, they are all very important to the success of the developer’s games.
