Suzuki Speaks Out on Dreamcast

Sega's AM chief designer and Virtua Fighter virtuoso Yu Suzuki addressed Dreamcast game development in a recent Japanese game magazine. He spoke of a new way of looking at gaming. A portion of the interview follows.

Q: With this new hardware, what kind of game do you want to develop?Suzuki: I'm thinking about DEA. This is a whole new game genre for me. If you want to describe it by comparing it to current genres, it could be described as an RPG. But if you ask me if it's like Dragon Quest or Final Fantasy, I think it's a bit different from those games.

DEA stands for Digital Entertainment Array. It means that while the game uses the latest computer graphics and other digital elements, it's also an entertainment vehicle at the same time. I choose the word Entertainment because it includes not only expected video game fun but also visual, sound, and other elements that can truly entertain people. All current games pursue one particular element - like a driving game, for example. You can say the same thing for flight sims or fighting games. In DEA, those elements are integrated into one, and it produces a particular kind of entertainment beyond what we now expect from video games.

Q: By the way, it's been three years since Virtua Fighter 3. When will we see Virtua Fighter 4?Suzuki: We will comment on the subject after the New Year.

Aw shucks!

Questions were posed by the editors of Japan's Famitsu Weekly magazine