Goichi Suda, also known as Suda51, is one of only a handful of truly colorfully eccentric videogame developers working in the business today. His first exposure to game-making was a gig writing scenarios for the Super Fire Pro Wrestling games. Before that, he worked as an undertaker. From there, he has made a name for himself as a visionary storyteller creating ambitious games filled with a bizarre hodgepodge of pop culture references – games like killer7, No More Heroes and Flower, Sun and Rain.

And, like many other big personalities in gaming (for example, Peter Molyneux or David Jaffe), Suda-san has a reputation for being a developer with big ideas who doesn’t always deliver on them. To correct that perception, he has enlisted the sage Shinji Mikami as a collaborator in Grasshopper Manufacture’s latest outing, Shadows of the Damned. The results look promising.

Shadows is a third-person action game that follows demon hunter Garcia Hotspur as he descends into Hell to rescue his girlfriend. Hell is extremely weird and Garcia is very, very rock n’ roll.

I recently had the opportunity to sit down with Suda-san and talk about Shadows of the Damned. As he approached, he saw the button on my lapel and smiled broadly. “Ahhhh, Morrissey! I love Morrissey!”

We were off to a good start…

Unwinnable: Tell me about Shadows of the Damned. What did you want to accomplish?

Goichi Suda: I just wanted to have players to experience Hell. There are games that offer experience with wars and the future but you don’t really see many games that let you experience Hell.

Unwinnable: What was your goal as a designer with the project? What were you looking to accomplish in terms of structure and game design – how does it differ from your previous work?

G.S: So for my company [Grasshopper Manufacture], this was to be our first HD game. We wanted to make Shadows of the Damned obviously high quality and also ultimately we wanted to make a new action game.

Unwinnable: What were some of the challenges you had to deal with working with HD and high-end graphics?