I took some notes on his talk:
The translation was a little shaky. There were two translators that kept taking turns for some reason. One was Japanese and a little less skilled at doing anything more than literal translation.
Here's my notes in bullets.
Suda was wearing a pink Kurt Cobain shirt with the lyric "Grandma Take Me Home" on the back.
He said he was from Nagano, then moved to the city, Tokyo, when he was 18.
Human was his first gaming gig. He made Wrestling games there and bailed out to start his own company a year before Human went under.
He has three creative mottos:
Call & Response (a reference to hip hop?)
Lets Punk
Crash and Build
He noted that the controls in Killer 7 were made in an effort to help players who couldn't handle 3D game controls using dual analog. Most of his friends couldn't play 3D games.
He said that people quite frequently suggest that he must be on drugs to come up with his scenarios, but he assured the audience that he's clean -- he likes to drink, but can't drink very much.
He talked at length about working with Mikami and the value of a producer protecting those working under him, such as directors, allowing them to be more creative and experimental.
Mikami sent him to E3 to check out what the American audience liked and he discovered that we prefer FPS and free movement. He and Mikami mulled the idea of doing away with the rails controls and eventually Suda made the decision to stick with the new style. Mikami said that's what he was thinking too, but had opted to leave the decision to Suda.
For Suda there are two types of game directors, business types who cater to the needs of the publisher and artist types whose primary concern is innovation.
He didn't really imply a preference to each type. In fact, he said that it's important to meet client demands if you want to make games.
He mentioned the influence of audience reception on the gaming board at 2ch and told the story of one game director who was heartbroken after bad user response there. The guy in question was emotionally paralyzed for months. The posts were pretty harsh. One user said "you should die."
Suda felt, though, that directors need to learn to get over it and learn to accept and use negative feedback to their advantage.
On game criticism and story: he noted that cinema and the culture around it is quite mature, while gaming is only really 20 years.
He made a call to game creators to be true to their initial creative impulse. He mentioned the first visceral reaction he had to seeing a video game arcade when he was young and the need to recreate that feeling in the games he creates.
He mentioned bands that created that visceral response: Joy Division, Nirvana, Stone Roses, Happy Mondays (I may have missed one)
Finally he announced an event in Japan on April 14th called Hoppers where Kojima and Mikami would be involved. The promo art was a cool recreation of an EC comics cover with Solid Snake fighting a zombie.