Yu Suzuki, the legendary ex-Sega game designer who has yet to be arrested for his role in creating the Shenmue series, has landed a new gig. VGC (opens in a new tab) reports that Suzuki has partnered with Oasyx, “an NFT project developed on Oasy’s gaming blockchain,” to produce a series of sought-after JPEGs based on the Virtua Fighter series, which he created.
The partnership means “fans can get limited edition ‘VF MAYU’ NFTs” of “special Virtua Fighter characters”, which will be, er, “incubated and revealed” next month. The slightly crude process will produce 1,000 Virtua Fighter NFTs – featuring “11 characters from the first three Virtua Fighter games” – for some, a place to spend too much money. They’ll also “serve as a base for future Metaverse avatars,” because of course they will.
It is not entirely clear what Suzuki’s role in the project actually is. In a statement, he said that he is “overseeing the development of OASYX’s unique worldview,” which I won’t pretend is a statement overloaded with meaning from where I sit, and that he is “excited to combine innovative technology in the form of blockchain- based NFTs, featuring three titles from the Virtua Fighter series”. It sounds to me like Yu Suzuki’s role in this endeavor was to tell Oasyx that it knew Yu Suzuki’s name in this endeavor. It seems like Sega hasn’t done much beyond licensing out Virtua Fighter, either.
If there’s a silver lining to all of this, it’s that Oasyx is a proof-of-stake, not proof-of-work, blockchain system. That means it doesn’t require the same energy-guzzling, environmentally-destroying computing power that a network like Bitcoin does. While the Virtua Fighter NFTs are worthy of the eye, at least they don’t eat the planet. So take comfort in that, I guess.
Last year we said that NFTs had been successfully bullied out of mainstream gaming (opens in a new tab), and I still believe it to be true. But it’s always a bit disheartening to see the swamp bubble up and spew out something like this or Square Enix’s awful NFT game (opens in a new tab), although it’s not the same NFT gold rush that seemed to grip video game company C-suites around the world for a while. And while I understand that Suzuki seems to have signed a deal that rewards him for doing hardly anything at all, it’s sad to see once great creators put their names to this nonsense.
