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One is a 3-D Space Harrier concept for smart phones. He describes a player sitting in an office chair holding a phone in front of them to simulate an arcade cockpit and using the gyro in the phone to control the game. He starts rotating in his chair to show how it would work. "If you don't have a chair that spins around, you can't really play the game, but it's a fun idea," he says.Next he loads up a prototype of a massively multiplayer role-playing game called "Pure Breed," in which each player travels around as a human with an animal companion. Suzuki says he noticed a trend in Japan of dog owners who started to dress and look like their pets, and he thought it could be interesting to explore a pet/owner relationship where the two have similar tastes. The game's concept art features a Western, surrealist style with a taxi shaped like an alligator and a house floating in midair. Suzuki says he started on these ideas while working full time at Sega, but they ended up being too expensive. "I'd need to cut down the budget to make it happen," he says.Next Suzuki pulls up one of his favorite concepts for a simplified touch-screen fighting game called "Psy-Phi." Unlike "Pure Breed," Sega promoted this one quite a bit before deciding not to release it because of a safety issue — the game's touch-screen technology produced too much heat and became hot on players' fingers.Suzuki pulls up concept art of early arcade cabinet ideas for Psy-Phi, showing that it originally went by the name "Psychic Duel." The art shows giant touch screens, clear screens, even a curved screen. "I wanted to create the next Virtua Fighter, basically," he says. "But I feel like the idea was probably ahead of its time back then. It might be a perfect concept for games now, actually."While running Ys Net, for the past three years Suzuki has also worked with developer Premium Agency as an advisor, and one of the concepts he's developed there was to turn Psy-Phi from a touch screen arcade game into a Kinect fighting game. He says the team at Premium Agency liked the idea, but because the company has investors, it can't decide what to develop on its own; the idea stalled before becoming much more than a concept.As Suzuki scrolls through his files, other titles appear — a concept called "E V E"; another called "Extreme Gunners" — and it becomes clear that Suzuki has dozens of these. He even points to art on the wall of one idea based on a character his daughter drew.
Looks like he has been planning touch gaming for a long time.
Next he loads up a prototype of a massively multiplayer role-playing game called "Pure Breed," in which each player travels around as a human with an animal companion. Suzuki says he noticed a trend in Japan of dog owners who started to dress and look like their pets, and he thought it could be interesting to explore a pet/owner relationship where the two have similar tastes. The game's concept art features a Western, surrealist style with a taxi shaped like an alligator and a house floating in midair. Suzuki says he started on these ideas while working full time at Sega, but they ended up being too expensive. "I'd need to cut down the budget to make it happen," he says.
This sounds amazing.Gah, he was 10 years too early, I'm sure after the success of Phantasy Star Online 2 SEGA would have been happy with him to make this.
It sounds like it would be really cool to travel to different areas and see what pets people have created or pet/armour combos etc that they've come up with.
It would really be something Japan would eat up too I feel. It could work on console, handheld, mobile or PC easily.Looking at the success of stuff like Dark Souls (Surreal world) and how big Phantasy Star Online 2 has become for SEGA he really was ahead of his time.Shenmue 3 is going to be amazing.
Gosh man can't wait to participate in the AMA...
