Yu Suzuki
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| Suzuki, Yu | |
|---|---|
| Born | June 10, 1958 Kamaishi, Iwate, Japan |
| Occupation | Game producer |
Yu Suzuki (Japanese: 鈴木 裕, Suzuki Yū, born June 10, 1958) is a Japanese game designer and producer who has spent his entire career with Sega Enterprises. Often referred to as Sega's answer to Shigeru Miyamoto, he has been responsible for the creation of many of Sega's most important arcade games such as Hang-On, Out Run, After Burner II, Virtua Fighter and Virtua Cop as well as the Dreamcast game Shenmue. In 2003, Suzuki became the sixth person to be inducted into the Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences' Hall of Fame.
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[edit] Career
Suzuki was born and raised in Iwate Prefecture, Japan, the older of two children to parents who were elementary school teachers. Suzuki's father was Yuzuru, and his mother, Taka, taught piano. Suzuki has one younger sister named Yuka, who became a dance teacher. Yu Suzuki's interests were wide-ranging as a child. At a young age, he was encouraged by his father to have a passionate interest in music and the arts. That interest would stay with him for the rest of his life. He also enjoyed building numerous model cars, houses, and robots with plastic blocks, as well as establishing a passion for drawing.
Before entering college, Suzuki flirted with the idea of going into education, having been influenced by his parents. After a while, he thought of becoming an illustrator and then a dentist. However, the latter dream was short-lived, as he didn't pass the required exam for dental school. Ever resourceful, Suzuki began to play the guitar, but he stated in an interview with G4TV that, "No matter how much I practised, I never got that much better."
Seeing the similarities between the plastic blocks he played with as a child and the architecture of electronic design, Yu Suzuki decided to pursue computer programming at the Okayama University of Science. He graduated from there in the early 1980s. He was also interested in music. He played guitar at Music club called "Muscat" at Okayama Ridai.
Suzuki joined Sega Enterprises in 1983 as a programmer. In his first year, he created a 2D boxing arcade game called Champion Boxing,[1] which became his debut work and was later ported to Sega's first home game console, the SG-1000.[1] Under the mantle of Sega's development studio AM2, Suzuki began working on another arcade game which would prove to be the big stepping-off point of his career. "To develop this game," Suzuki told G4TV, "I rode on motorcycles a lot. When we came up with the prototype (for the arcades), I would ride on that prototype bike for hours and hours every day." His and AM2's efforts finally culminated into the game Hang-On, released in 1985. Hang-On was a success as it broke new ground in arcade technology. It did not feature any traditional controls, as the movement of the onscreen avatar was dictated by the movements the player made on the stationary motorcycle cabinet. AM2 soon followed with the immersive, 3D-esque shooting game Space Harrier later that year. Showing his interest in Ferraris, Suzuki created the driving simulator Out Run, which was released in 1986. Although it didn't officially feature a Ferrari, the player controlled a car that looked almost exactly like one. But Out Run's innovations didn't necessarily lie in the design of the car; it offered players a wide variety of driving paths and routes to complete the game, increasing replay value. It also featured a radio with three songs to choose from as players drove through the wide variety of landscapes. The soundtrack has proven to be quite popular in the gaming world. Despite what its name may have suggested, Out Run wasn't merely a racing game; it was a virtual road trip.
After these hits, Suzuki's creativity continued to yield great results for Sega, from the jet fighting After Burner series in the late 1980s to the roller coaster racer Power Drift in 1988. The dawn of the 1990s saw Suzuki bringing immersive gaming to the next level with a spiritual sequel to After Burner called G-LOC in 1990, which featured a gyroscope-like cabinet that rotated 360 degrees to give players the realistic illusion of flying a fighter jet. Suzuki had been interested in 3D technology since his days in college and he wanted to fully exploit its capabilities. Although Space Harrier and Out Run had graphics similar to 3D, they did not fully utilize the capabilities. When Sega released the Model 1 development board, a piece of hardware capable of generating polygonal graphics, Suzuki and AM2 went right to work. In 1992, they released the 3D Formula 1 racer Virtua Racing, which was considered one of, if not the most, realistic-looking arcade games on the market at that time. Virtua Racing proved to be a foreshadowing of the next 3D project from AM2, one that proved to be their biggest success to date.
In 1993, Suzuki created Virtua Fighter, the first 3D computer graphics fighting game, which became enormously popular and spawned a series of sequels and spinoffs.[1] The Virtua Fighter series was recognized by the Smithsonian Institution as an application which made great contributions to society in the field of art and entertainment. For the first time ever, a Japanese game became a part of the Smithsonian Institution's Permanent Research Collection on Information Technology Innovation, and is now being kept perpetually at the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History in Washington, D.C.
Suzuki's Shenmue for the Dreamcast gave rise to a new style of adventure games, bending it away from the typical mold most games of its nature seem to fit into, with Suzuki's own concept denoted as "FREE" (Full Reactive Eyes Entertainment). The story, graphics, and the innovative system exceeded those of many previous games. Shenmue is currently the second most expensive game to be developed (being recently surpassed by Grand Theft Auto IV in which it costing roughly 100 Million USD.) with the whole project costing 70 million USD.[2]
One of Suzuki's most notable arcade games was Ferrari F355 Challenge, a racing simulator created upon a strong partnership with Ferrari. The game itself drew attention not only from the gaming industry overall, but also from the automobile industry. Rubens Barrichello of the F1 Team Ferrari was quoted by Suzuki to "have considered to purchase one for practicing."
In the spring of 2009, rumors began surfacing that Yu Suzuki had stepped down from Sega after 26 years in its employ. However, an article written by Brendan Sinclair, a reporter for the American video game journalism website GameSpot, stated the rumors to be false and that an anonymous representative for Sega of America revealed that Suzuki was in fact not retiring but staying "in a much more diminished capacity" than in the past. He has become the manager of the R&D department for Sega's new development studio, AM Plus. AM Plus has solely focused its attention on the Japanese video arcade market with such titles as Psy-Phi (which was cancelled), a unique dodgeball-esque one-on-one fighting game whose development was headed by Suzuki, and the character-based racing game Sega Race TV (limited release).[verification needed]
Yu Suzuki's interests go far beyond the world of programming, as he is also an amateur philosopher, painter, and mathematician.[citation needed]
[edit] List of major works
[edit] References
- ^ a b c GameCenter CX - 2nd Season, Episode 13. Retrieved on 2009-04-04
- ^ YouTube - Shenmue: The 70 million Dollar question
- System16 - The Arcade Museum
- Interview with Yu Suzuki and Will Wright, June 2002
- (Japanese) Yu Suzuki, Akira Nagae. Suzuki Yu - Game Works Vol. 1. 2002, ASPECT, ISBN 4-7572-0889-8
- http://shenmue.planets.gamespy.com/Yu_Suzuki.shtml
[edit] External links
- Yu Suzuki profile on MobyGames
- Yu Suzuki at the Internet Movie Database
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