Suda51 on modern game development: "It's a real bitch."
"Text-based adventures were really popular in Japan ," Suda51 tells me through translator and Silver Case localizer James Mountain. "Since this was our first game ever, we were basically an indie company. We had a really small staff of just five people. Since those adventures were popular, we wanted to make one, but at the time the only ones that were popular were the old-school ones. We didn't want to go old-school, we wanted to make a new type of text-based adventure, so that's how we came up with The Silver Case."
" was something I was interested in for a while," Suda explains. "It was the first time I had the freedom to put whatever I wanted into a game. The reason I was able to make the game at all, and the reason I was able to force it to get through was because I put about 300% of my energy into making it the way I wanted to make it. To be honest, thinking back now about how hard I worked on the game, and how much I put into it, I feel like I want to go back 18 years ago, and compliment the me of back then about how good a job I did."
For Suda51, revisiting his first independent game is resurfacing a lot of old feelings, and reminding him of what game development was like before his pseudonym became widely known by fans and professionals throughout the industry. "It's a weird thing to say," he explains, "but I see all these indie developers and creators putting their games out, and I'm checking out the games themselves and talking to people. I remember what it's like to be not Suda51, but just Goichi Suda, just this guy back in the day... I remember how hard I had to work just to get anything at all."
He's also reminded of the relative ease with which even a game as strange as The Silver Case could've been made 18 years ago. "I want to think that the real core of game development hasn't changed," Suda51 tells me, "but put simply, what's changed the most in the past 20 years or so is, back in the day, if you wanted to make a game, you had a meeting, and you talked about what kind of game you wanted to make, then you made the game.
Nowadays, to be blunt about it, there's all these pointless-ass meetings, where you've got to report every single thing to a bunch of people, and all these people who don't even need to be there have to be in the meeting, and constantly talking about stuff. There's not really the opportunity to just talk about a game and make it any more; you gotta set up everything and get everything worked out, get it cleared by a bunch of people. It's a real bitch to have to go through this whole entire process for every single little thing."
"As far as games are concerned," he says, "people talk about indie games, AAA games - personally, I don't give a shit about either of those. I want to make the kind of games that game-players play, and that people find interesting... I became Suda51 with Killer7, and since then, I haven't made an adventure game yet. So, as Suda51, I'd like to make an adventure game and see how it turns out."
http://www.gamesradar.com/before-there-was-suda51-there-was-the-silver-case/
