Samurai combat in Ghost of Tsushima.
Authentic samurai combat, made in America.
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The DeanBeat: Why outsiders see us better than we can see ourselves

When I learned that Ghost of Tsushima, an authentic samurai swordfighting action-adventure game, was under development at Bellevue, Washington-based based Sucker Punch, I did a double take.

How could Sucker Punch faithfully reconstruct the samurai world and accurately depict the 13th century Mongol invasion of Japan? I asked Chris Zimmerman, cofounder of Sucker Punch, about this, considering the game studio was making the title for Sony, a big Japanese company where tradition runs deep. Why wouldn’t Sony get one of its many Japanese developers or studios to make this game? In games with so much fine detail, how could an American team get the authenticity right?

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Written by

Dean Takahashi

Dean Takahashi is editorial director for GamesBeat. He has been a tech journalist since 1988, and he has covered games as a beat since 1996. He was lead writer for GamesBeat at VentureBeat from 2008 to April 2025. Prior to that, he wrote for the San Jose Mercury News, the Red Herring, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and the Dallas Times-Herald. He is the author of two books, "Opening the Xbox" and "The Xbox 360 Uncloaked." He organizes the annual GamesBeat Next, GamesBeat Summit and GamesBeat Insider Series: Hollywood and Games conferences and is a frequent speaker at gaming and tech events. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.