Goichi Suda, aka Suda51, has shed light on what is up with Shadows of the Damned’s very late rerelease, and the prospects of making a sequel.
Suda51’s studio, Grasshopper Manufacture, is as eclectic a game company as it gets. Their games aren’t particularly financially successful, or that critically lauded, but they have a dedicated following. It’s not so much that Suda51 is particularly good or bad at game design, but he has a unique voice that earned him that fan following.
Games like Shadows of the Damned, Lollipop Chainsaw, Killer is Dead, and No More Heroes, all came out of the seventh generation of video game consoles, and they all have common elements that also seem to be tied to that generation’s particular zeitgeist. One can see the inspiration from the likes of John Woo, Quentin Tarantino, and Takashi Miike.
At the same time, these games were coming up at around the same time other game companies were coming up with more sophisticated game design systems, such as the sprawling open worlds of Assassin’s Creed, or the community building difficulty of the first Soulslike games. Those game ideas would prove popular enough to keep getting refined in sequels, and other games like it would take those ideas further.
That’s why when a very Suda51 type game like Wanted: Dead released last year, reviewers referred to it as dated. But Wanted: Dead does have a fanbase, and a dedicated fanbase for Shadows of the Damned also persists to this day.
In a new interview with Gematsu, Suda51 made some surprising revelations on why it took over a decade for Shadows of the Damned: Hella Remastered to come out. He said:
”Shadows of the Damned was our own intellectual property, and we spoke with Electronic Arts about doing a remastered version about seven or eight years ago. But Electronic Arts had the publishing rights at the time, and we were told that if we were to do a remastered version then it would have to be released on Origin.
After joining the NetEase Group we spoke with Electronic Arts again, and since the Origin-exclusive thing was no longer an issue they told us we could go ahead and do it however we wanted. We’d been wanting to do the remastered version for a long time, and so now that we were finally able to, we went for it.”
Somehow EA Origin was involved, but really, Grasshopper Manufacture were likely just waiting out the end of their publishing deal with EA for this game. As for a sequel, Suda51 is more blunt about what it would take:
“If the remaster sells well enough, and if it seems like enough people really want it, then some sort of continuation of the series would absolutely be something we would at least consider working on in the future.”
It sounds like Suda51 is happy to just be getting the game back on stores at all. To be fair, Suda51 is now at work on an even newer title in Hotel Barcelona, and he may have other unannounced projects in the works as well. Like Shadows of the Damned‘s old fans, he is likely waiting to see if Shadows of the Damned: Hella Remastered will amount to more than just another retro rerelease.
