Yu Suzuki on Shenmue Online
I reckon the pages near the back of Famitsu are generally the most interesting, because that’s where Japan’s game industry celebrities are given space to talk about all kinds of crap, and they always seem to do it in high spirits. There are pictures of them drinking coffee and smiling, which is how I’ve always thought video game visionaries should be pictured. In this week’s Famitsu, Yoshiki Okamoto (ex-Capcom) interviews SEGA demigod Yu Suzuki.
We learn that Suzuki’s first car was a Nissan Sunny, for which he paid ¥70,000 (£375 or €472) while he was a student in Okayama. Elsewhere he jokes that because he doesn’t play games other than his own he has no ability to copy other games and therefore, because his projects always start from “zero”, he gets ideas from talking with people who have nothing to with games – people, he says, such as “the proprietors of eel restaurants.”
Anyway, Okamoto does all of us a service by twice asking Suzuki about the fate of Shenmue Online. The first time, Suzuki just laughs and says, “Come on, can’t you ask me something that I can answer?”
But Okamoto’s a persistent interviewer and so as his final question he returns with, “How is Shenmue Online coming along, then?”
“I wonder if it’s OK to answer,” Suzuki says. He then confers with SEGA’s PR person who is at the scene of the conversation and finally gets back to Okamoto: “OK, I’ll say as much as I can… Due to a situation, the project is in a ‘Pending’ state. But personally I’m hoping to be reunited with Shenmue Online. I haven’t given up.”
And that’s the end of the interview. Cliffhanger, eh! Unfortunately he doesn’t elaborate on the “situation” that’s caused Shenmue Online to go into ‘Pending’ and he doesn’t talk about what he’s been doing during the suspension of work on Shenmue Online, so all we can do is speculate and write furious letters to SEGA…
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