In the mid-1980s, Sega’s arcade games were built to be seen from across the room. You sat astride a motorbike and leaned it into the bends, or strapped into a seat that rocked and swayed as you flew, or drove a red Ferrari in a cabinet that moved with the road. Yu Suzuki directed most of them. He started at Sega as a programmer, and the hardware grew around his games: “by and large, we were making hardware for the express purpose of the games I and everyone else at Sega were working on,” he told Gamasutra in 2011. In the 1990s he took Sega into polygon 3D with Virtua Racing and Virtua Fighter, and then spent much of his later career on one very long story, Shenmue.
Fast facts
- Born: 1958, in Iwate Prefecture, Japan. Published sources disagree on the day.
- Joined Sega: 1983, as a programmer.
- 1980s arcade games: Hang-On (1985), Space Harrier (1985), Out Run (1986), After Burner (1987).
- 1990s: head of the division that became Sega AM2; Virtua Racing (1992), Virtua Fighter (1993), Daytona USA.
- Later work: Shenmue (1999) and Shenmue II (2001) for the Dreamcast; OutRun 2 (2003) as producer; his own studio, Ys Net, from 2008; Shenmue III (2019).
A programmer at Sega
Suzuki was in his mid-twenties when he joined Sega in 1983. A Brazilian profile in 2000 said he had studied science in Okayama. His first game was Champion Boxing for Sega’s first home console, the SG-1000. Wireframe reported that his managers liked it so much that they turned it into an arcade machine “without changing a line of code”.
Taikan: games you sit on
Hang-On (1985) was the first of what Sega called taikan, or “body sensation”, games. The player sat on a replica motorbike and tilted it left and right to steer. Its board used two 16-bit processors to scale the pictures of the road, the riders and the scenery, so they grew smoothly as they came towards you. Sega called the technique “Super Scaler”: it drew a convincing 3D world without a single polygon.
Space Harrier (1985) put the player in a seat that rocked and shifted with the movements on screen. It began as a flying game with a helicopter, then a Harrier jump jet. Suzuki found the aircraft too hard to animate, replaced it with a running and flying figure carrying a cannon, and moved the game to a fantasy world. Sega was wary of 3D shooting games, which had not made money before, and according to his programmer Satoshi Mifune, Suzuki offered to give up his salary if Space Harrier failed.
Out Run (1986) came next. Its producer, Yoji Ishii, said that Suzuki directed it and “deserves credit”, and that while it was being made the two of them drove around Europe: Sega’s president, Hayao Nakayama, had vetoed a drive across America as too dangerous. After Burner (1987), inspired by the film Top Gun, put the player in an enclosed, pod-like cabinet.
Few homes could offer any of this. Suzuki’s games came to Britain as home computer conversions, and US Gold’s versions of Out Run for the Spectrum, Commodore 64 and Amstrad drew very mixed reviews in 1988. Sega sold its own, more faithful versions for the Master System.
Suzuki worked fast, often sleeping on a fold-out bed under his desk. He wanted realism. “Making more and more realistic games is the direction I want to go in,” he said in a 1988 interview. “Games aren’t reality, of course, so you do need a lot of tricks and techniques to bring a sense of realism to a game.” In the same interview came a complaint every developer would recognise: “If only I could create things without having to worry about the cost.”
Polygons: AM2 in the 1990s
The team Suzuki led became Sega’s AM2 division. Virtua Racing (1992) was Sega’s first polygon 3D game, running on its new Model 1 arcade hardware. Wireframe noted that it was not the first 3D racing game, but it was the first to feel as fast and thrilling as the sprite-based ones. Virtua Fighter (1993) asked whether fully 3D human fighters could compete with the sprite-based Street Fighter games. When the Saturn went on sale in Japan in November 1994, Edge found Virtua Fighter the only worthwhile game available and called the home version “a near-perfect conversion”. Daytona USA followed on Sega’s Model 2 board, and Suzuki produced Virtua Cop and Virtua Fighter 2.
Shenmue
In 1986 Suzuki had told Japan’s Beep! magazine that after Hang-On he wanted to make “a 3D adventure or role-playing-style game”, but that it “would have taken too long to develop”. A decade later he began one for the Saturn, first built around the Virtua Fighter characters. It moved to the Dreamcast and became Shenmue: an open 3D town with a large cast of characters living their own routines, and a revenge story told over dozens of hours. Around 300 people worked on it. “At first we said it would all fit one disc maybe, then two discs, then three,” Suzuki recalled in 2000. Edge called it “one of the most expensive and graphically impressive videogaming projects to be undertaken”; Wireframe reported a figure of $47 million.
Shenmue came out in 1999 and was a critical success, but it could not save the Dreamcast. Sega announced in January 2001 that it would stop making the console, and Shenmue II followed that September. When Sega explained its new strategy as a software publisher in June 2001, Suzuki was one of the studio heads on the stage. Several of his projects in the 2000s were cancelled, among them Shenmue Online and an arcade fighting game, Psy-Phi. He returned to the road as producer of OutRun 2 (2003).
Ys Net and Shenmue III
Suzuki founded his own company, Ys Net, in 2008, and, according to Wireframe, left Sega for good in 2011. In 2010 Edge reported that Ys Net was working on Shenmue City, a PC and mobile game for Japan set in the first game’s Yokosuka. The real sequel was announced in June 2015 with a Kickstarter campaign, and fans who had waited since 2001 paid for it. Shenmue III, developed by Ys Net and published by Deep Silver, came out for PC and PlayStation 4 on 19 November 2019. It picked up where the second game had stopped, with Ryo Hazuki arriving in rural China. Wireframe found that it “looks and feels like a continuation of the Dreamcast series, warts and all”. In 2020 Suzuki talked of a fourth Shenmue that would appeal to “a broader audience”.
Sources
- Wireframe issue 43, September 2020, pp. 84–89: “Developer Profile: Yu Suzuki” (joining Sega in 1983; Champion Boxing; Hang-On’s processors; Space Harrier’s origins and Mifune’s account of the salary offer; After Burner and Top Gun; the fold-out bed; the 1988 and 2011 quotes; AM2, Virtua Racing, Virtua Fighter, Daytona USA; the 1986 Beep! interview; Shenmue’s development, staff and cost; Shenmue II; the cancelled projects; Ys Net; OutRun 2; the 2020 remark about a fourth game).
- Steve Jarratt and Damien McFerran, SEGA Master System: a visual compendium (Bitmap Books, 2019), p. 60 (Yoji Ishii on Out Run and the drive around Europe) and pp. 88–89 (Suzuki joining Sega in 1983, Champion Boxing, taikan games, Super Scaler hardware, the home computer conversions).
- SuperGamePower (Brazil) issue 72, March 2000, p. 48: profile (birth date, studies in Okayama, hired in 1983).
- Sega Retro, “Yu Suzuki” (web, secondary): birthplace and date, and his credits on Daytona USA (Model 2), Virtua Cop and Virtua Fighter 2. https://segaretro.org/Yu_Suzuki
- Edge issue 17, February 1995: the Saturn’s Japanese launch and Virtua Fighter. Issue 81, February 2000: Shenmue in Japan. Issue 95, March 2001: the end of Dreamcast production. Issue 100, August 2001, p. 6: Sega’s strategy conference of 5 June 2001. Issue 222, Christmas 2010: Ys Net and Shenmue City.
- Wireframe issue 24, October 2019, p. 12: Shenmue III preview (Ys Net, Deep Silver, 19 November). Issue 29, December 2019: the Kickstarter campaign of June 2015.
- Computer & Video Games, CRASH, Zzap!64 and Amstrad Action, February and March 1988: reviews of the Out Run home conversions (see Out Run).