Grasshopper Manufacture may be dead if “Class F*ck up” Romeo is a Dead Man f*cks up

If aliens came to earth and asked you to explain what video games are, and you had just one game to give them as an example, what game would you choose? I could see how some might go with Minecraft, Fortnite, or even Tetris. But not me. Though I’ve just started the game, I’m already leaning towards nominating Romeo is a Dead Man. It constantly revels in the rules that games break better than any other medium. Just about every visual storytelling style, from pixel art, realistic polygons, 2D motion comics, and Tron-style CGI minimalism is on display here in regular increments. And like with No More Heroes 3, the all-new game from Romeo’s creator Suda51, print video game magazine pages sometimes appear on-screen to help teach you how to play. This game loves being a video game so much that it can’t stop screaming about it, even if it knows that will lead it to fail in the eyes of some critics.

ONE KIND-OF FUCK UP

Suda51 isn’t trying to hide that fact. In a recent live stream interview with Kinda Funny Games, he closed the chat by saying that (with some paraphrasing by me) “If the game market was like school, it’s like you have all these kids that are nailing their tests, and doing all their homework and everything [referring to well-polished, AAA games]… and I feel like every class should have one kind-of fuck up. One kid who just screws around, he’s funny, other kids might like him, but he doesn’t really do his work. So if the game industry was like a classroom, Romeo is A Dead Man would be that fuck up. It’s a break from the stuff that’s made too well, that was made with more money than we have.”

Earlier, at around 40 minutes into the conversation, he vaguely touched on how much, or how little, his studio, Grasshopper Manufacture, had to work with when developing Romeo is a Dead Man. He said (again, paraphrased) “… right now, things are tough all over in the game industry. As far as Grasshopper is concerned, it’s our 29th year in business this year, so I’ve seen lots of troubled times, and things like this tend to come in waves. And we at Grasshopper are experiencing our own waves coming at us at the moment. So right now what I’m doing, is every day, I go out to the beach, learning how to surf [to ride those waves] totally metaphorically, I don’t know how to surf or anything…”

BANG FOR YOUR BUCK

This is probably as close as we’re going to get to Suda51 confirming my concerns that the company is in trouble, and that Romeo is a Dead Man’s sales may make or break the studio as we know it. So, buy the game if you want to keep seeing video games that love being video games exist. It’s a lot of fun, it offers about 12 hours of bang for your buck on lower difficulties (at least for non-completionists), and it’s currently on sale with a launch discount.

Punk’s Not Dead, as long as we feed it money every now and again. Personally, I’m buying two copies today.