Yu Suzuki

Suzuki, Yu
Yu Suzuki at the Game Developers Conference 2011
Born	(1958-06-10) June 10, 1958 Kamaishi, Iwate, Japan
Occupation	Game producer

Yu Suzuki (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, including Hang-On, Space Harrier, Out Run, After Burner, and pioneering 3D games such as Virtua Racing, Virtua Fighter, Daytona USA, and Virtua Cop, as well as the Shenmue series of open world adventure games for the Dreamcast. In 2003, Suzuki became the sixth person to be inducted into the Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences' Hall of Fame. IGN listed him at #9 in their Top 100 Game Creators of All Time list.

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.

Career at Sega

Suzuki joined Sega Enterprises in 1983 as a programmer. In his first year, he created a 2D boxing arcade game called Champion Boxing, which became his debut work and was later ported to Sega's first home game console, the SG-1000. 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 third-person shooter 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, adding elements of nonlinear gameplay and 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 video 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 3D 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. It is regarded as one of the most influential video games of all time, for laying the foundations for subsequent 3D racing games and for popularizing 3D polygonal graphics. 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 fighting game, which became enormously popular and spawned a series of sequels and spinoffs. It inspired many 3D fighting games such as the Tekken and Soul Calibur series. 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. The following year, he created Virtua Cop, which broke new ground by popularizing the use of 3D polygons in shooter games. It inspired 3D light gun shooters such as Time Crisis and The House of the Dead as well as inspiring 3D first-person shooters such as GoldenEye 007.

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 was the most expensive game to be developed (until Grand Theft Auto IV in 2008), with the whole project costing 70 million USD, equivalent to 93 million USD in 2011. Shenmue was a major step forward for 3D open world, nonlinear gameplay, touted as offering an unparalleled level of player freedom, giving them full reign to explore an expansive sandbox city with its own day-night cycles, changing weather, and fully voiced non-player characters going about their daily routines. The game's large interactive environments, wealth of options, level of detail and the scope of its urban sandbox exploration has been compared to later sandbox games like Grand Theft Auto III and its sequels, Sega's own Yakuza series, Fallout 3, and Deadly Premonition. The game also introduced the quick time event mechanic in its modern form and coined a name for it, "QTE". The mechanic has since appeared in many later titles, including popular action games such as Resident Evil 4, God of War, Tomb Raider: Legend, Heavenly Sword, and Robert Ludlum's The Bourne Conspiracy.

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." The game was considered the most accurate racing simulation of the Ferrari F355 possible up until that time.

Rumored retirement

In the spring of 2009, rumors surfaced that Yu Suzuki would step down from Sega after 26 years of employment. 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). According to a gamasutra interview, Yu Suzuki plans to officially leave Sega in September 2011 to concentrate on his own development studio YS NET. However, he will not completely cut ties with Sega as he will take an advisory role within the company.

Mainstream return

In April 2010, Gofanboy reported that Yu Suzuki would be appearing at E3 2010 revealing a once-cancelled game remodeled for the Playstation 3, unfortunately Yu Suzuki wasn't at the Sega Booth at E3 nor were there any games revealed developed by AM+ or Am2, the news reported never materialized.

However, it was revealed that fall that a new game in the Shenmue Series titled Shenmue City was being developed by Sunsoft & YS Net (Yu Suzuki's new studio) for Yahoo Games.

List of major works

Title	Year released	Platform	Role
Champion Boxing	1984	---	Producer / Director
Champion Pro Wrestling	1985	---	Producer / Director
Space Harrier	1985	Sega Space Harrier hardware	Producer / Director
Hang-On	1985	Sega Space Harrier hardware	Producer / Director
Out Run	1986	Sega Out Run hardware	Producer / Director
Super Hang-On	1986	Sega Space Harrier hardware	Producer
Enduro Racer	1986	Sega Space Harrier hardware	Producer / Director
After Burner	1987	Sega X Board	Producer / Director
After Burner II	1987	Sega X Board	Producer / Director
Power Drift	1988	Sega Y Board	Producer / Director
Turbo Outrun	1989	Sega Out Run hardware	Producer
G-LOC: Air Battle	1990	Sega Y Board	Producer / Director
Virtua Racing	1992	Sega Model 1	Producer / Director
Virtua Fighter	1993	Sega Model 1	Director
Virtua Cop	1994	Sega Model 2	Producer
Virtua Fighter 2	1994	Sega Model 2	Producer / Director
Virtua Cop 2	1995	Sega Model 2	Producer
Virtua Fighter 3	1996	Sega Model 3	Producer
Virtua Fighter 3 Team Battle	1997	Sega Model 3	Producer
Ferrari F355 Challenge	1999	Sega NAOMI	Producer / Director
Shenmue	1999	Dreamcast	Producer / Director
Shenmue II	2001	Dreamcast, Xbox	Producer / Director
Propeller Arena	2001 Cancelled	Dreamcast	Producer
Virtua Fighter 4	2001	Sega NAOMI 2, PS2	Executive director
Suzuki Yu - Game Works Vol. 1	2002	Dreamcast
Virtua Fighter 4 Evolution	2002	Sega NAOMI 2 / PS2	Executive director
Virtua Fighter 4 Final Tuned	2003	Sega NAOMI 2	Producer
Propeller Arena	2003 Leaked Online	Dreamcast	Executive director
Virtua Cop 3	2003	Sega Chihiro	Executive director
OutRun 2	2003	Sega Chihiro	Producer
Shenmue Online	Cancelled	PC	Director
Psy-Phi	2005 Cancelled	Sega Lindbergh	Producer
Sega Race TV	2008	Sega Lindbergh	Producer
Shenmue City	2010	Yahoo Mobage Service	Director

References

• System16 - The Arcade Museum
• Interview with Yu Suzuki and Will Wright, June 2002
• Template:Jp icon Yu Suzuki, Akira Nagae. Suzuki Yu - Game Works Vol. 1. 2002, ASPECT, ISBN 4-7572-0889-8
• Shenmue.planets.gamespy.com

External links

• Yu Suzuki profile on MobyGames
• Yu Suzuki at IMDb