Grasshopper Manufacture

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Grasshopper Manufacture, Inc.

Type	Corporation
Founded	March 30, 1998
Headquarters	Suginami, Tokyo
Key people	Goichi Suda: CEO
Industry	Video games
Products	Various video game titles
Employees	48
Website	Grasshopper Manufacture

Grasshopper Manufacture, Inc. is a Japanese video game development house founded on March 30, 1998 in Suginami, Japan. Grasshopper gained mainstream notoriety in 2005 for the Nintendo GameCube and PlayStation 2 game killer7. In addition to killer7, they have developed Michigan (released in Japan and Europe) and a number of Japan-only titles. Grasshopper Manufacture was also recently responsible for the Nintendo DS game Contact and the Wii game No More Heroes. The company is headed by Goichi Suda, also known as Suda51, and is noted for its original and imaginative titles - ones that are also fraught with financial risk. Potential losses are often made up by the development of games based on popular anime franchises, such as Samurai Champloo: Sidetracked and Blood+: One Night Kiss.

Grasshopper is now working on another Wii title, Fatal Frame IV, to be published by Tecmo. On top of this, Grasshopper is also said to be working on an Xbox 360 title, and have presented a concept for a PlayStation 3 game called Kurayami, a non-linear action adventure inspired by the worrying and confused universe of the Czech writer Franz Kafka, whom Goichi Suda admires.

In May 2007, Suda announced during a speech at the 2007 Game Developers Conference that Grasshopper was at the time working on three titles for the Wii, which have since been revealed as No More Heroes and Fatal Frame IV; there is no information on the status of the third Wii game in development then.