Romeo is a Dead Man is nearly here at last, bringing the world another hyper-violent action game with a quirky hero and out-of-this-world narrative. It stands as the latest work from the collective minds of Suda 51 and his peers at Netease-owned Grasshopper Games, emitting that same strong Suda-signal as beloved prior works like No More Heroes or Killer is Dead.

But what inspired this space-faring adventure? To find out, Eurogamer sat down for a chat with Suda 51 during his visit to the UK, translated directly by Grasshopper Games community manager James R. Mountain.

The topics discussed vary, between inspirations for Romeo is a Dead Man and how a cancelled project called Zombie Rider lives on in this latest release, what defines Grasshopper and Suda 51′ signature style, a particularly gruesome face-melting game over screen, generative AI, and ‘Jazz Band’ game development. You can read the interview in full, below.

Romeo is a Dead Man – Official Release Date Trailer

You can watch the Romeo is a Dead Man release date trailer here!

What were your inspirations when creating Romeo is a Dead Man? Suda: There were actually a lot of inspirations when making the game. The first is Zombie movies, back in the 1960’s there was Night of the Living Dead. I can’t remember the director’s name, but there’s 28 Days Later. Another thing was, when you look at the relationship between Romeo Stargazer and his grandfather Ben, that was inspired by both Back to the Future and, obviously, a lot of Rick & Morty.

How did you land on Romeo’s design? That kind of horrific spin on a cool action-protagonist?Suda: Some time ago I was planning a game called Zombie Rider, which would feature a guy that was half-human, half-zombie. Depending on the situation, you could switch back-and-forth between those two modes, changing what he could do. He had a motorcycle and he’d ride around taking on other zombies. That never came to fruition, but it’s something I had in the back of my head.

I decided, okay instead of going for Zombie Rider, how about I go for what we have now in Romeo, where the character is half-dead. I started off with the ideas from Zombie Rider, tweaked it, and added Romeo’s grandfather Ben using the Dead Gear to bring him back to life. There were originally going to be five different kinds of masks for Romeo, that you could swap out to throughout the game. Now it’s been cut down to two.

Why did you decide to cut down from five masks to two?Suda: Mainly due to schedule reasons. The designs were really specific and detailed, and it would have taken too much time to flesh them all out.

How would you say that Grasshopper Manufacture’s – and your own! – style has evolved over the years? What do you think a Grasshopper game is today?Suda: When we started out we were a small team, we did text-based games. From there on, we designed more story-focused games, action games… I guess we’re not an adventure game-specialised studio, but it’s what we’re best at, it’s what we’re doing a lot recently. There have been a lot of changes to Grasshopper as a studio, where we’ve had bigger teams at times, smaller teams at times. In general, we’ve had that core team of 10-12 people, with others that come and go to help out with various aspects of game development.

But it’s hard for me to say what my style, or Grasshopper style, is. It’s hard for me to look at it objectively. We get called a lot of things, and have a lot of labels put on us. A lot of people say we’re a ‘punk-style’ studio. That sounds kind of cool so I’m happy to hear that. In an interview yesterday one of our interviewers said for a while I was referred to as a “maverick of game development”! Honestly, I thought that sounded really cool once I had the word explained to me. Not only does it sound like Tom Cruise in Top Gun, or whatever, it sounds like the way we try to develop games and function as a studio.

I’m not trying to call myself Tom Cruise or anything, but hopefully the studio can become something as cool as Maverick.

If you’ve loved anything Suda in the past, expect that same gory action here. | Image credit: Grasshopper Manufacture.

Over the years I think it’s safe to say you’ve grown a fanbase that loves your particular style, both in terms of the tone in these games and the artistic approach. Like, in Romeo is a Dead Man, there’s this really horrid, fantastic Game Over screen where Romeo’s face melts off.Suda: That’s a practical effect actually! As far as the ‘Grasshopper style’ goes, when most developers create a game, you’ve got certain guidelines or ideas on what a game will be: what characters it’ll have, what features it’ll have. You fill that in and work from there – you colour inside the lines. We don’t really do that at Grasshopper. Personally, I’ve never really done that. It’s obviously important to know what you’re making, but instead of having a set-in-stone blueprint, we have a more ‘adlib development’ style.

We’ll have a couple basic ideas for the game, like who the main character will be, and we’ll start from there. We’ll have meetings with different members of staff and riff off each other. “If we have this, why don’t we also have this? Or what about this to contrast it? In that case, let’s remove this!” That way, a lot of things change when we’re making a game. A lot of times when we have new staff coming in, at first they’re confused! They go, aren’t you meant to have this stuff figured out already?

Again, in game development it’s important to know what you’re doing. To some degree we have that, but that’s not the way we make games. It’s more like a jam session in a jazz band. Different people putting ideas together, stuff they came up with on the spot. It seems to work for us, I’d say that’s the most Grasshopper-specific thing that plays into a Grasshopper style.

And this allows the freedom to pursue these wilder ideas?Suda: Yeah, it definitely does give us some degree of freedom to implement ideas from out of nowhere, to change things here and there. At the same time, it does make things more difficult. I get bitched at a lot by our production team. They’ll be like ‘Hey man, we were doing this, and now we have to do this instead? We’ve got to consider schedules and stuff like that’. So it can make work harder for other staff members, and myself, as well. But that freedom stops us from being stuck in a blueprint if we feel something will make a game better, regardless of what point of development we may be in.

Was that melting face one such example?Suda: The general idea was something I had pretty early on, I wanted to have Romeo’s face melting. We originally wanted to do that in real time, but we found out quickly that was pretty much impossible. So we tried exploring other options: using animation, different kinds of CGI, but nothing really felt right.

One day, I was talking to our art director, and he said he had a friend who worked in special effects make-up in movies, practical effects stuff. We asked if his friend could so the face melting, like in Raiders of the Lost Ark, and he was like ‘yeah sure!’

We went over, tried some stuff out, and did a trial run first. It looked perfect, it didn’t spring off half-way through. A day later, we did the second run and he nailed it.

I mean this is pretty gnarly stuff. | Image credit: Grasshopper Manufacture.

Ahead of this game’s release, you said there would be no generative AI used in the development of Romeo is a Dead Man. Last year, Japan’s Computer Entertainment Supplier’s Association surveyed Japanese game developers and found that over half were using generative AI to create their games. How do you feel about that?Suda: As far as not using any AI for our games, it started as a Netease policy for all their companies. They originally had a section researching and developing AI-related stuff, but at one point they decided not to do that any more. They folded that section and told their studios to not use AI in games, to not use it at all.

As for Grasshopper ourselves, we never did any research into AI. It’s hard to say… I don’t have an extremely strong opinion on other people using it in their games one way or another. I think it’ll come down to the future, is there going to be a point where gamers think generative AI gets really cool, and they want to see more of it? If it comes to that point, then I might not be opposed if it’s what everyone wants, we can look into it.

Right now, we just don’t use it. We have no interest in it. It’s kind of hard to make a solid statement on how I feel about the industry, to be honest I don’t have the knowledge-base to comment on it.

We just spoke about a cool development story where someone with real-world practical effects experience added something unique to your game, something maybe you could try to imitate with gen AI, but is at its best with actual skill. Do you think Romeo is a Dead Man could be the game it is today through the use of this technology?Suda: For me personally, a lot of the AI stuff I see pops up on social media. As far as it’s come, there’s something about the images and videos you see that feels off. Most people have that same kind of sense, something psychological lets you know something isn’t right here. Something’s kinda funky.

They’ve been saying the day will come when AI will fool people, when you won’t know something is AI. That may be true, but honestly, I don’t think it has reached those levels yet. When I see something made with generative AI something in the back of my brain gets set off.

If I used AI to make Romeo: A.) it would have been a fake Romeo. Not that he was a real person to begin with, but people would notice something shallow about the character. He would be hard to relate to, and kind of creepy.

And, B.) The way we make games now, the specific skills of the studio and people we know, be it practical effects, art, creating graphics on their own… those skills and passion the humans put into their works comes across to players. It’s something people can feel, not just that it was person-made not AI-made, but you can tell someone poured their heart into this. Someone worked hard to make this happen.

At some point there may be this thing I’ve heard be called the “New Reality”, but even if it does get to that point and it’s really good and realistic, I feel humans have something in their brain that tells them something is off. So while I don’t have a strict opinion either way on people using it in their own games, that’s not the way we do it. That’s one of the things that bring people to Grasshopper games – they can feel people’s efforts themselves. It’s something we’re proud of.

This is a real, hand-made, Romeo. | Image credit: Grasshopper Manufacture

You mentioned Netease closed their AI research section?Suda: I don’t know, they never explained directly why. If I had to assume, it was probably one or both of two things. A lot of gamers out there don’t like AI and having it in their games. Another thing is issues with copyright infringement. That can be tricky to get around, and clear before making something. That was probably part of it too – it would be easier to get rid of it altogether. But, again, that’s my assumption. No one told me directly.

At this point you’ve created a collection of games over the years, all with their own dedicated audiences. What’s left on your bucket list?Suda: There are about five in particular, but ten overall, projects that I’ve been cooking up for a while. Those are the ones I want to do in my lifetime.

Final question. After people play Romeo is a Dead Man, what games should people check out?Suda: There’s a game people are probably already familiar with but they should check out, called Skate Story. That’s a really cool game, and I’d like more people to play that. There’s another studio we hooked up with at Gamescom in Germany last year – Slow Bros. They made Harold Halibut. Last year the creator of this game lent us a PC for Gamescom, and he invited us to his studio. Super cool guys. I believe he’s working on a new game at the moment ,so when it comes out I hope people play it!

Romeo is a Dead Man releases on the 11th February to PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X/S.