Suda 51, from Grasshopper Manufacture, the “Video Game Band”, was at Nordic Game to talk about how different influences affected the development of their game No More Heroes. Those influences were from movies, anime, other games and certain personalities.

The presentation consisted of Suda going through those influences, explaining what their effect was and then for many of them, showing a video clip. Showing videos turned out to be a good way to keep things rolling as the presentation needed to be translated from Japanese to English.

After presenting how certain works influenced previous games, Suda moved on to give a comprehensive list of influences specific to No More Heroes. It was very interesting to see how different things directly influenced aspects of the game, such as how the Motel where the main character Travis is staying in the game, and its surroundings were directly taken from the movie Memento or how the town and the streets were based on Dirty Harry.

Other movie influences were: El Topo, which was responsible for the boss battles, Spaceballs, for the beam katana, and Gozu, for a name of a store in the game, and Jackass the Movie, for among other things, the attitude of Johnny Knoxville, who also happened to be the influence for the main character in the game, Travis Touchdown.

Additionally other people such as Scarlett Johansson, Josh Barnett, Ian Curtis, Charles Bronson and Genichiro Tenryu were inspirations to characters in the game. In addition, even the anime series in the game are based on real life anime series.

In the end though, the main influences for the game were the games that Grasshopper had previously made. The combat in No More Heroes is especially similar to the combat in Samurai Champloo, a game based on the anime of the same name.

As a closing point, video was shown where the main character Travis is overlaid on top of real video footage. Suda wishes that the players could be able to meet the game character in real life.

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