Games industry icons: Yu Suzuki, arcade virtuoso & 3D visionary

“Can you knock out your opponent with a knockout punch?” This slogan graced promotional flyers for Champion Boxing (1984), the very first game Yu Suzuki developed for Sega.  Back then, initially for Sega's first home console, the SG-1000.

Yu Suzuki was born on June 10, 1958 in the coastal town of Kamaishi, about 530 kilometers north of Tokyo, in Iwate Prefecture, the main island of Japan. Even as a child, the offspring of two primary school teachers can be enthusiastic about all kinds of creative activities. He likes to paint and draw, has a lot of fun creating all sorts of objects with plastic building blocks and got it in his head early on that he wanted to become a teacher or illustrator himself. After graduating from school, however, he first set his sights on the profession of dentist.

“Unfortunately, I couldn’t pass the entrance exams to study dentistry, so I started learning to play the guitar,” Suzuki recalls in an interview with the American TV channel G4 TV. “But no matter how much I practiced, I hardly got any better.” It is precisely these failures that lead Suzuki to take a completely different direction and study computer science with a focus on programming at Okayama University of Science. Suzuki is making good progress and is already taking up a topic for his pre-diploma thesis that will also keep him very busy later: 3D computer graphics in video games.

My designs have always been 3D from the start. All calculations in the system were 3D, even in Hang-On. I calculated the position, scale and zoom rate in 3D and converted it back to 2D. So I’ve always thought in 3D.
Yu Suzuki

As soon as he got his degree, Suzuki immediately applied to various large computer companies – above all Sega, because there you only have to work five days a week instead of the usual six days in Japan at the time. But Suzuki also likes the fact that Sega pays for both the travel expenses and the accommodation during the interview in Tokyo.

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“The person who interviewed me was quite a persuasive speaker and I really liked Sega as a company. So quite impressed, I decided to work for this company. Incidentally, I found out later that I was inspired by Mr. Endo, the Schleuser was interviewed and he was really well trained in the art of recruiting,” recaps Suzuki in the book Sega Hard Historia, which was published on July 22, 2021 and has unfortunately only been published in Japanese so far.

The early years at Sega

Suzuki, hired by Sega in April 1983 primarily for his programming talent, is given a job in the department that handles both software and hardware. Once there, the then 25-year-old – despite all the challenges – immediately felt at home.






“Can you knock out your opponent with a knockout punch?” This slogan graced promotional flyers for Champion Boxing (1984), the very first game Yu Suzuki developed for Sega. Back then, initially for Sega’s first home console, the SG-1000.

Source: Moby Games




“Back then, there weren’t enough developer machines for everyone, which is why newcomers were only allowed to use this equipment for a few minutes a day. However, if you stayed in the office overnight, you could let off steam with it for as long as you wanted – as long as there was no supervisor on site”, continues Suzuki.

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Suzuki is always full of enthusiasm, which is why he is soon allowed to develop his first own game for Sega’s first home console SG-1000, launched on July 15, 1983: Champion Boxing. While Rieko Kodama and Yoshiki Kawasaki take care of the artistic aspects, Suzuki handles game design and programming.

The result is a simple but fun boxing game with four levels of difficulty and an always-on referee who counts downed boxers immediately. Champion Boxing is doing well in sales and also impresses Suzuki’s superiors.

Reference-www.pcgames.de