26 Facts About Yu Suzuki

1.

Yu Suzuki is a Japanese game designer, producer, programmer, and engineer, who headed Sega's AM2 team for 18 years.

2.

In 2003, Suzuki became the sixth person to be inducted into the Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences' Hall of Fame.

3.

Yu Suzuki was promoted to project leader while still in his first year at the company.

4.

Yu Suzuki soon followed with the 3D-esque third-person shooter game Space Harrier later that year.

5.

Yu Suzuki had been interested in 3D technology since his days in college.

6.

In 1990, Yu Suzuki brought out a spiritual sequel to After Burner called G-LOC.

7.

Yu Suzuki introduced and spearheaded the Model series of arcade hardware which would help lay the foundation for 3D arcade games for AM2 but other arcade departments at Sega as well In 1992, they released the 3D Formula 1 racer Virtua Racing, which was considered one of, if not the most, realistic-looking arcade games on the market at that time.

8.

In 1993, Yu Suzuki created Virtua Fighter, the first 3D fighting game, which became enormously popular and spawned a series of sequels and spinoffs.

9.

Yu Suzuki acquired Lockheed Martin's military texture mapping technology that cost millions and managed to engineer it down to $50 per chip, which he used to introduce texture-mapped 3D characters with Virtua Fighter 2.

10.

Yu Suzuki then led the development of the Sega Model 3, which debuted with Virtua Fighter 3.

11.

Yu Suzuki oversaw most of the home console conversions of AM2's arcade games.

12.

Yu Suzuki's arcade game Ferrari F355 Challenge was a racing simulator created upon a strong partnership with Ferrari.

13.

However, an article written by Brendan Sinclair, a reporter for the American video game journalism website GameSpot, stated the rumors to be false and that an anonymous representative for Sega of America revealed that Yu Suzuki was in fact not retiring but staying "in a much more diminished capacity" than in the past.

14.

Yu Suzuki planned to officially leave Sega in September 2011 to concentrate on his own development studio Ys Net, while retaining an advisory role within Sega.

15.

In March 2011, Yu Suzuki was at GDC to receive a pioneer award for his body of work.

16.

In December 2011, Yu Suzuki flew to TGS in France and participated in an open panel career retrospective.

17.

Yu Suzuki participated in an open with Tekken producer Katsuhiro Harada.

18.

In 2012, Yu Suzuki designed a mobile game for the Virtua Fighter series, titled Cool Champ.

19.

In 2013, Yu Suzuki designed a new shooting game, titled Shooting Wars with Premium Agency; this was Ys Net's first original game unrelated to any of Yu Suzuki's previous Sega franchises.

20.

In July 2013, Yu Suzuki traveled to Monaco to attend the Monaco Anime Game Show.

21.

On March 19,2014, Yu Suzuki held a Shenmue postmortem at the Game Developers Conference 2014, with Suzuki discussing the development of Shenmue.

22.

In June the same year, Yu Suzuki received a "Legend Award" in Barcelona, Spain during Gamelab Barcelona 2014.

23.

Yu Suzuki began his work as director of Shenmue III's development immediately following the successful funding campaign in July 2015.

24.

On February 27,2016 Yu Suzuki appeared as a guest presenter at the annual Monaco Anime Games International Conferences, where he showed images and video clips of the development progress for Shenmue III to conference attendees.

25.

Yu Suzuki said in an interview that while he greatly enjoys creating games, he has relatively little interest in playing them, and prefers to spend his free time watching movies and visiting theme parks.

26.

On top of games, Yu Suzuki led the creation of a technical demo "Tower of Babel" prepared for the Dreamcast showcase at Tokyo New Otani Hotel on May 1,1998.