Yū Suzuki

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Suzuki (2011)

Yū Suzuki ( Japanese 鈴木 裕 , Suzuki Yū ; born June 10, 1958 in Kamaishi , Iwate Prefecture , Japan ) is a Japanese game developer and producer.

Career

Yū Suzuki was born in Kamaishi as the eldest of two children. His parents were both primary school teachers who supported him in his artistic interests. Before attending high school, Suzuki, like his parents and sister, considered taking up the teaching profession. However, since he did not pass the required entrance examination, his wish to become a dentist later failed. Eventually he studied programming at Okayama University of Science , where he successfully graduated in the early 1980s.

Suzuki began his career in the video game industry in 1983 with Sega , where he still works today. At this time he started developing some arcade games that have already made great success. In 1993 he published with the game Virtua Fighter , the first fighting game ( fighting game ), in which the characters no longer 2D bitmaps exist, but as polygons were calculated.

Yū Suzuki described the development of his most ambitious project to date, Shenmue, the most expensive and complex video game to date, at $ 47 million as a “life's work” and “fulfilling a dream” . Although the game, like its successor Shenmue II , received critical praise worldwide and sent numerous video gamers into euphoria , it was not a great sales success. Suzuki then withdrew from the active development of console games for the time being and is working increasingly on arcade games again. After a Kickstarter campaign for a sequel to the Shenmue game series was successful, he worked on the development of Shenmue III .

Suzuki was president of Sega's in-house development studio AM2 until he was replaced by Hiroshi Kataoka on June 30, 2003. In 2003, Yu Suzuki was inducted into the AIAS Hall of Fame .

The passionate guitarist Suzuki is married and lives in Tokyo .

Suzuki games (as director or producer)

Individual evidence

  1. Most Expensive Video Game. YouTube, October 9, 2006, accessed March 30, 2008 .
  2. Yu Suzuki. MobyGames , June 2002, accessed January 28, 2008 .

Web links