Actually, I think I owe Suzuki-san an apology. I was looking through some old magazines when I found this (characteristically dreadful) Gamefan interview with him ahead of the release of VF2. He mentions a couple of times here that he doesn't play video games or care about what anyone else is doing, so at least he's been consistent over his career.
And as the guy who was basically single-handedly the reason Sega became something bigger than more notable early 80s arcade contemporaries like Taito or Namco ever managed to be, you can't really criticize the approach. I'm a little skeptical he actually spent two decades at the top of the industry without actually ever playing and analyzing what the competition was doing; something like VF's implementation of frame data is suspiciously precise. But I can accept that he was mainly just vibing off regular stuff he liked in real life - sports cars & racing bikes, Top Gun, kung fu movies, prog rock album art, etc. It wouldn't have been unreasonable for him to believe that's why his games came across as original and resonated broadly and internationally with the normies, while deeply-reverential-to-gaming stuff like Gunstar struggled at retail. And it's not like he had zero dogs on his resume at this point - he mentions in the interview that he'd love to do a fantasy RPG, leaving out (or maybe just forgetting) that he'd headed up 1989's early Mega Drive title Sword of Vermillion, a game whose play mechanics come across like they were drawn up by someone who'd only heard about action RPGs in a boardroom planning meeting or something. (There were rumours that an earlier 1989 MD title, Phantasy Star II, had its first person dungeons cut due to ROM restraints following the 1988 chip shortage - I've kind of wondered for a while if those elements were just repurposed for Vermilion's super scaler-ey 1st person dungeons).
Reading this era of magazines, I kinda feel bad for all the Sega heads in GF's editorial and readership getting their hopes up for the upcoming "arcade perfect" Daytona, knowing what's coming.
I adore all these games now more than ever, even though all my fat is on my peepee. :O
