Suda says Grasshopper’s ‘ten-year plan’ includes 3 original IPs, maybe some reboots

Grasshopper Manufacture’s Goichi Suda has revealed the company has a ten-year plan that includes three original game IPs.

Speaking to VGC in a recent interview, the Japanese creator said he could even look to revive some of Grasshopper’s older IPs, or attempt to license “dormant” franchises from other companies, including maybe frequent collaborator Nintendo.

Suda – who is more widley recognised by his nickname Suda 51 – is known for his stylish and violent action games including Killer7, No More Heroes and Shadow of the Damned.

In recent years, his studio Grasshopper has operated on a smaller scale as it attempts to recover from its 2018 split from former parent company GungHo, which kept the majority of its former team members.

This year’s Nintendo-published No More Heroes 3 marked an important milestone in its recovery, with a generally favourable critical reception from reviewers and fans.

Suda told VGC contributor Tom Regan that Grasshopper has already started pre-production on its next project and indicated it would like to focus fully on original properties for the next decade.

“We’ve got a general plan in place for the next ten years. At this point, we’re planning on doing three titles over the next decade: three new IPs,” he said. “We’ve actually already begun the pre-production stuff on the first title, but I can’t say anything about it just yet.”

“While I wouldn’t say the games we plan to make are going to be full-on AAA titles, they aren’t exactly going to be really small-scale or anything like [3DS shooter] Liberation Maiden, either; I’d say they’re probably going to be around ‘AA’-scale games. As in, the games themselves will be around AA-level scale, and the core team making them will be a relatively compact team.”

One of these original games could potentially be the horror game Suda has said he’d like to make in collaboration with Hidetaka ‘Swery’ Suehiro.

Suda went on to state that he wouldn’t rule out deviating from the original IP plan, should an attractive property become available or a good idea for reviving one of its own.

“With regard to the three new IPs I mentioned, we may actually go a slightly different route,” he explained. “What I mean is, we may actually decide to do like one new, original IP – the one we’re working on now – and then make a game version of an existing IP for our second game, and then go back and do another new one for the third one.

“There are a few games from back in the day that I’d like to get my hands on and try to do a reboot or a remake of some kind, or we may get approached by the right company with the right IP and decide to go with that… We’ll see how things work out.”

The writer and director clarified that while Grasshopper doesn’t own the licenses for the likes of No More Heroes and Killer 7, it does hold the rights for the Silver Case series, ‘Flower, Sun, and Rain’, Killer is Dead, and Shadows of the Damned.

“While I don’t have any current plans or anything in the works, if I were to go back and revisit some of our past titles, it would most likely be one of these,” he confirmed.

“If I were to do something with one of our past titles, I don’t know if it would be an actual sequel, or something more akin to a remake or remaster, but one thing I’d be interested in is revisiting Killer is Dead.

“You know how first another director did Suicide Squad, and then James Gunn did the reboot, THE Suicide Squad? I might like to do something like that, like take Killer is Dead and remake it into The Killer is Dead or something.

“Because the game that got released ended up being quite different from what I had originally set out to make, and revisiting that and remaking it into what it was originally meant to be could be really interesting.”

Quizzed on which “games from back in the day” he would like to reboot, and if they could be from frequent collaborator Nintendo, Suda said: “Again, I don’t have any concrete plans at the moment, but of course I’m always open to a collaboration with Nintendo.

“It would be really cool to be able to work on a reboot or remake of some of the older Nintendo IPs that have been around for awhile, especially some of the ones that have been dormant for a long time. If I’m going to do something to really surprise all the gamers out there, then I’d like to do it together with Nintendo.”