Before speaking to Giochi Suda (AKA Suda51) and Shinji Mikami, I got the chance to play their remaster of Shadows of the Damned for 30 minutes. I selected one of the new costumes for protagonist Garcia Hotspur, the one based on villain Ocho Corazones (the flashiest one) from Travis Strikes Again, and I jumped right into the action.
I spent my time delivering magical strawberries to baby faces on doors, shooting demons, listening to my talking gun joke about boners, and getting my character drunk to restore his health while he follows the steps of Paula, the love of his life, into hell. Perfect preparation to meet Suda51 and Shinji Mikami.
As I walked into the private press room at Gamescom, both Suda51 and Mikami stood up to say hello and grab my hand. They spent the next minute looking and speaking about my shirt, which has the cover art of Sega Genesis’ Street Fighter 2 Special Champion Edition but with a Super Nintendo logo. They looked excited and confused, and all I get is that they think “it’s a cool shirt” and that they like Street Fighter.
“Paula is very sexy. I really like her.” This is Suda51’s answer when I asked him what he likes the most about Shadows of the Damned. He laughs and continues: “The action parts in general are one of the things that I’m most proud of the game, and one of the things I’d like people to pay the most attention to.” Mikami also jokes that he “likes the part where you can walk over and pull his ass [sic],” but then he highlights the amount of “crazy sh*t” in the game.
Shadows of the Damned is a kind of miracle. It was originally conceived in 2006 by Suda51 as an ambitious Kafkaesque adventure based on the novel The Castle, and it involved a fear of the dark. Originally called Kurayami, the project didn’t get any publishers until Grasshopper started working with EA a few years later. Five or six “completely different” drafts later and multiple modifications and tweaks from EA, and the Shadows of the Damned we know today was born.
“Mikami did a lot of the work and helped out with stuff like, for example, the shooting and the action elements,” explains Suda51. He recalls a situation in which Mikami was doing some play-testing and realized that there was input lag when you aimed with your gun.
“I didn’t even notice it myself at first, but we called in the lead programmer at the time and checked out the code and made a couple tweaks, and it turns out there actually was something. I believe it was in the code: it was causing just a several frame lag on the aiming thing. When the programmer came in and fixed the code, it went perfectly.
“Mikami-san saw the delay in the first few frames, and the moment he touched it, he understood it, reacted to it, and gave feedback. He looked at it in detail. That’s the kind of stuff, the really specific small stuff that only he could pick up on.”
Suda51 also recalls the duo’s first collaboration, Killer7, and appreciates having Mikami next to him in the development. During the writing process of Killer7, Suda51 didn’t like the game’s script – so much that he considered “quitting writing scripts”. That was until Mikami praised his work and said that “it was amazing”.
“One of the things I like the most about working with [Mikami] is, put simply, he gives me confidence,” explains Suda51. “There’s a lot of times when I’ll be writing up a scenario and think like, ‘I’m not sure this is so good or I don’t really know what to think about this’ and then Mikami will look at it and say, ‘no, this is good, you should keep going like this’ and I’m trying to feel confident in my work.”
While Mikami is the first name that comes to mind when thinking about Shadows of the Damned, Suda51 also got the chance to work with the legendary composer of the Silent Hill series, Akira Yamaoka, who had left Konami not so long ago. “Yamaoka-san was one of our staff members, so we left all the music to him,” explains Suda51. “We were able to leave that to him without any worries.”
Another key collaboration was the art design from Q Hayashida, a popular Japanese mangaka who was writing Dorohedoro at the time. She created the design of all the cool and terrifying creatures you’ll have to face in the game.
“I was fortunate enough to meet her and become acquaintances,” says Suda51. “I believe it was right around the time when Dorehodoro was still running, and when she’d have some free time, she’d design some characters and send in some images that she’d written up, and every time I was just like, ‘oh, wow, look at this’. It was the kind of thing, the kind of characters and the kind of images that I feel like you wouldn’t normally get from someone who’s used to working in video games, and it turned out to be really fun.
“Every time she’d send something in, I’d check it out and I’d show it to [Mikami], and he’d be like, ‘hey, these are pretty good’”.
Shadows of the Damned tells the story of Garcia Hotspur, a demon hunter who returns home to see his beloved Paulina being abducted by Fleming, the lord of demons. He grabs his magic gun, Johnson (who has a personality of its own), and enters the underworld to save Paulina.
The story is filled with classic Suda-isms in the banter between the main characters, the hilarious situations Garcia sees himself in, and all the weird stuff happening in this twisted world. But ultimately, Shadows of the Damned is a love story. It’s that tried and true tale about going through hell for someone you love. Something that Suda51 tells me that he would “totally do, [he’d] go anywhere for the person he loves.” However, when Mikami looks at him and says, “dude, it’s hell!” Suda51 isn’t so sure anymore.
“If you play video games, then it’s the kind of story that you’re almost definitely going to be familiar with automatically,” explains Suda51. “For example, the kind of love triangle in Shadows of the Damned, between Garcia and Fleming and Paula, it’s pretty much the same thing as Super Mario Bros.
“You’ve got Mario and Peach and Bowser. So it’s the kind of story that anyone who’s played video games at all can get into really easily and understand the dynamic really quickly.“
Suda51 wants to go deeper and presents his classic theory about our beloved Nintendo characters. “There’s a theory that Mario and Peach aren’t in a relationship,” he begins. “Maybe they’re just friends. Because you never see them in the game actually doing romantic things. So maybe it turns out that they are just friends, and he’s just a guy helping his friend out. And maybe my company and I just completely misunderstood their dynamic and based it on that by accident.”
He presses me on the subject, clearly interested in insight to this comparison he just made up. I answer that maybe it’s an asexual relationship and what drives them the most is the dynamic of being trapped and saved by each other. Suda51 laughs and doubles down and asks me what I think is going on between Peach and Bowser. “Maybe Peach is already in a relationship with Bowser,” says Suda51. “I feel like maybe Peach’s actual boyfriend is Bowser. Maybe Mario is the one who’s being played by them.”
I divert the conversation to their careers and legacies, and Suda51 and Mikami both sound tired. “I just feel like, ‘wow, I was really working my ass off making games’,” says Suda51, and Mikami quickly agrees. “There were times when we’d have to work for 48 hours straight without sleeping.”
Suda51 still wants to make games for a long time, even if he doesn’t have the same energy as before. “When I was younger, I had a lot of physical strength,” he says. “I was able to stay up all night. When I was in my 20s, I was able to stay up until 4 am. When I was younger, I was impressed by how much energy I used to have.”
However, when they think about their legacies and what they are leaving to the world, they don’t seem to think too much about it, at least on a personal level. “If you mean legacy [as in] after I’m dead, then [I’d be] dead, I don’t care,” Suda51 tells me. However, he quickly thinks about his studio and how much he cares about it.
“Even after I’m dead, I want to make sure that Grasshopper can continue to exist as a brand. Like some of the companies you find in France, for example, they’ve been around for 100 years or so. More than my own personal legacy, that’s the one that I care about preserving most.”
It seems that Grasshopper is on the right track. 2023 marked the company’s 25th anniversary, and it’s not stopping anytime soon, with Suda51 wondering about what his next project would be – he is interested in following Shadows of the Damned’s universe with a prequel or even combining it with No More Heroes, or even creating a Gundam game. But we’ll still have to wait to see what the future holds for these two creators.
“Making new games and putting them out is what we do,” says Suda51 in a final comment. “I just want to let the fans know that I want to keep doing that and have Grasshopper remain able to keep doing that for as long as possible.”
