It’s been quite a while since Grasshopper Manufacture put out a completely original game, almost a decade in fact, with 2016’s Let It Die. Since then there’s been a couple No More Heroes, but during a presentation held last night from some company I’ve never heard of, PlayStation I think it was, the developer revealed something wholly new: Romeo Is A Dead Man. This was easily my personal highlight because of how balls to the wall stupid it looks, but it was missing an important thing known as a release date that a lot of other games actually featured for once. And that’s almost definitely because Grasshopper is a bit worried about GTA 6.
“At this point, our development team is working at full force to get this thing finished,” executive director and studio founder Goichi “Suda51” Suda said in a press release. “Back in the day, this would’ve been right around the time when staff members started bringing in sleeping bags to stay overnight in the studio, but nowadays we make sure that everyone gets enough time to rest and refresh properly. I’ll never forget the craziness of working all night in a frenzy back in our salad days, receiving warning mails for doing too much overtime (this actually happened).”
When asked directly about why Romeo Is A Dead Man has a release window as vague as 2026, Suda51 quite plainly said “That’s kinda obvious, isn’t it? That One Game had its release date announced, right? Every publisher wants to make sure to steer clear of That One Game’s release date. But what if we were to flex a little and release it on the same day… Yeah, nope — just thinking about that is way too scary. Alright then, see you later.”
Yeah, that all sounds like Suda51 alright. Romeo Is A Dead Man certainly sounds like one of his games too. It follows the titular Romeo, an FBI Space-Time special agent (sure!) whose grandfather uses some fancy tech to stop him from dying, so he’s in a constant state of being between life and death.
As him you’ll go hunting for fugitives across multiple universes, slicing them up in impeccable gory fashion with a big ole sword. It is undoubtedly a future 7/10 in the making, and I couldn’t be more thrilled.
