Suda51 would like to make a new Shadows of the Damned game, ideally with Shinji Mikami involved

Goichi Suda (aka Suda51) has said he’d like to make a new game starring the characters from Shadows of the Damned, without the restrictions placed on him the first time.

The original Shadows of the Damned was released in 2011 and, while developed by Suda’s studio Grasshopper Manufacture, was published by EA.

Suda’s frustration with the original game’s development is well-documented, as clashes with EA led to him making multiple redesigns and compromising his original vision.

Now that Grasshopper is working on a remaster of Shadows of the Damned, VGC asked Suda in a recent interview if he was able to put some of those previously compromised ideas back into the game.

Suda told us that while this won’t be the case and the remaster will be based on the version that was released, he does hope to use those ideas at some stage in a future project.

“If we were to make Shadows of the Damned in the way I’d originally planned and used all the ideas I originally wanted to use for the remaster, we’d basically have to remake the entire game from the ground up,” he told us.

“So this time it’s going to be a faithful remaster of the original game, so it’s the game fans got before, only remastered and improved.

“Hopefully some time in the future I might get a chance to actually use the ideas that I wasn’t able to use in the beginning – I’ve got them stocked up for possible future use, so hopefully maybe someday we can see something closer to my original vision for the game.”

We asked Suda if this meant he’d like to make a sequel to Shadows of the Damned in the future.

“Yeah, I really love the characters of Garcia and Johnson, and Fleming in particular,” he replied.

“And with the remaster coming out now and the stuff we had in Travis Strikes Again… there’s nothing concrete that we have set in place or anything, but I hope that we can use this remaster as a sort of jumping-off point for fleshing out these characters more and maybe putting them to a bit more use.

“It may be a sequel or a future unrelated game or something, but I want to use these characters a bit more freely. I’d definitely like to revisit them again and do something with them in the future, so the idea of a collaboration like that in the future wouldn’t be an impossibility.”

We also asked if he would like to once again involve Resident Evil director Shinji Mikami, who was a producer on Shadows of the Damned and announced earlier this year that he was leaving Tango Gameworks.

“Yeah, if possible I’d like to have Mikami-san’s help on that as well,” Suda replied.

Earlier this month, shortly after VGC spoke to Suda, Shinji Mikami visited the Grasshopper studio, but it wasn’t clear if this was for business reasons or just to “hang out”, as Suda tweeted.

Shadows of the Damned’s main protagonist, Garcia Hotspur, is a demon hunter who has to rescue his girlfriend Paula from the Lord of Demons.

Because it was published by EA, for some time it was unclear as to who owned the rights. However, in an interview with VGC back in 2021, Suda confirmed that Grasshopper held the rights to Shadows of the Damned, and that its return was possible (hence the remaster now being in development).

“There are several IPs which we do own the rights to, and so we’re free to do whatever we like with those,” he told us at the time.

“The IPs for which we hold the rights would be the Silver Case series, Flower, Sun, and Rain, Killer is Dead, and Shadows of the Damned. While I don’t have any current plans or anything in the works, if I were to go back and revisit some of our past titles, it would most likely be one of these.”