Suda51 says Grasshopper staff are "funky in the head," as he explains Romeo Is a Dead Man development

Anyone who has ever played a Suda51 game knows in their heart that this is a man who operates on another level to most of us.

It is, therefore, hardly a surprise that the staff who work under him at Grasshopper Manufacture embody the same guiding principles, according to the man himself.

During Romeo Is a Dead Man's recent press tour, we managed to convince Suda to visit our office, whereupon we interviewed him while cooking him a katsu curry, as one does.

One prominent aspect of the game that becomes clear early on is the sheer dearth of minigames available, from growing seeds into the zombie-like Bastards and navigating Pac-Man-style mazes to, of course, cooking katsu curry.

And the reason behind this is that Suda has seen fit to let loose the Grasshopper team on Romeo – a team that is just as off-kilter as he is.

"A lot of the staff at Grasshopper are a bit, kind of funky in the head, I guess you could say," he noted.

"Also, a lot of them seem to have this strange sort of motivation, thinking, 'OK, if I don't come up with something really weird, or come up with something kind of out of left field, then Suda's not going to OK it. So, I've got to come up with something just really weird, and something that nobody else would think of.'

"One of them came up to me with this idea for, "Hey, let's have katsu curry, and you could actually make it and then when you eat it, Romeo gets powered up,' and I was like, 'Yeah, OK!' That's pretty much how it came to be."

Beyond this, the fact that Grasshopper has such a small, but diversely talented team drove Romeo to platform all sorts of different art styles, from realistic combat scenes to a pixel art hub world and comic book exposition.

"We're not a huge studio, we're not like a big AAA studio," Suda explained. "We're relatively small. Currently, we only have about 50 people on staff.

"To be honest, we can't spend a whole lot of money, and so luckily, I've got a lot of experience in, and I feel I'm pretty good at making games that use different art styles, different visual styles.

"When it came time to decide, OK, how are we going to make this game, how are we going to be able to afford to make this game, I thought, instead of doing full-on, all polygon, full 3D graphics, let's just mix up a bunch of different art styles and do the stuff that each individual member is good at and kind of mix that together.

"That's how we got that super cool-looking, super awesome game, Romeo Is a Dead Man."

Romeo Is a Dead Man is out now on PC, PS5 and Xbox Series X/S.

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