Sony may have been a little overzealous in February when it announced the PlayStation 4, touting a huge number of developers that plan to support the console. The image Sony flashed on screen was more crowded with logos than a ten car pile up at the Daytona 500. Plenty of big guns were listed on the board, from Activision to Rockstar Games, but they were given equal billing to some of Japan’s more niche-oriented console game publishers. Right at the very bottom of the image sat the distinctive logo for Grasshopper Manufacture, Goichi “Suda 51” Suda’s studio that was responsible for the likes of No More Heroes and Lollipop Chainsaw. So what’s Suda’s team of self-professed punks making for the next Sony machine?
“Grasshopper Manufacture will make games for PS4, as will (parent company) GungHo Online Entertainment and (sister company) Acquire,” said Suda in a new column for Japan’s Famitsu magazine, “I can’t go into detail at this stage, but for sure the new challenge is exciting.”
Even without new hardware coming to the market, Grasshopper is already in a state of transition. Just days after the company announced its new Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 game, Killer is Dead, GungHo Online Entertainment announced it had acquired the studio. Suda, once a devoted independent game maker, said that he agreed to the new arrangement so that he could get back to creating new games himself rather than run a business. While Suda isn’t ready to name his first PS4 project, the machine certainly fits in with his new creative drive.
“I think that in the future, cloud delivery will become totally commonplace. Social networking has certainly done that. To be able to play anywhere on any device, with shared data—this will be an alluring new feature for games.”
“[It] will surely result in new ways to play. Thinking about the future of this stuff and then constructing and outputting something appealing is our job as game designers, and from that challenge we can take new strength. And that makes me horny.”
The Gaikai streaming functionality of the PlayStation 4 can’t come soon enough for Suda. Killer is Dead is due out this summer, but with the PlayStation 4 expected out just months later, Sony will be pushing a console Grasshopper’s game can’t be played on.
Source: Edge Magazine
