Great news from awards season – and amazingly this story has nothing to do with the ongoing love-in for tepid stutterfest The King’s Speech or even carping on about blubby tosspot Ricky Gervais.
Yu Suzuki, the veteran Sega developer behind everything from classic 80s arcades to Shenmue, is to receive the Pioneer Award at March’s 11th Annual Game Developers Choice Awards.
Awarded by his (lesser mortal) gaming peers, this is about the biggest accolade in video game development – and well deserved it is too, Monsieur Suzuki.
How come? Because there aren’t many real legends in the backroom nerdiness of gaming, but Suzuki is a ground breaking uber-developer who was behind pretty much every great thing Sega did in the last 25 years – creating one of the first interactive arcades in Hang On, the legendary Afterburner and Out Run, the spawning of 3D driving with Virtua Racing and the invention of the whole 3D fighting genre with Virtua Fighter.
And that little hitlist pretty much sums up the first two decades of my gaming, so woo hoo, Yu – we salute you too!
The man is indeed a ledge. Those old Sega dudes really were awesome so it’s about time they got some credit! I say give Yuzo Koshiro an award too – he deserves it for the Streets of Rage 2 soundtrack alone! There are some vids around of him DJing those songs in a proper nightclub that i’d put up here if i knew how the heck to do it!