Yu Suzuki still at SEGA after all

SEGA has said that development guru Yu Suzuki is still an employee with the publisher after all.

During a recent interview, SEGA of America president Simon Jeffery stated: "[Yu Suzuki] is kind of his own man right now. Every now and again, he'll come up with an idea, and I don't think anything has come out of that yet, but we're still working with him. He's not an employee anymore..."

Jeffery, evidently, got the wrong end of the stick, and has subsequently issued a retraction.

"I can safely say that Yu Suzuki is in fact still a SEGA employee. [He] is a Creative Officer of SEGA Corp," reads the statement on Gamasutra.

Phew.

Suzuki-san has been keeping something of a low profile in recent years. Having blazed a trail with world-famous titles such as OutRun, Space Harrier, and Shenmue, the famed game design luminary has recently been involved with numerous projects which have not come to fruition - notably Shenmue Online and arcade prototype Psy Phi.

A relatively recent arcade project, SEGA Race, did get released in 2007, but whether it's any good is hard to tell - Brighton arcades seem to have been frozen in time circa 1998. Still, Daytona is fun.

So, maybe those Shenmue III rumours can re-commence after all...