Legendary former Sega game designer Yutaka Suzuki, who worked on the "Shenmue" series and has yet to be arrested, has a new job: according to VGC (opens in new tab), Suzuki is "an NFT project developed on the Oasys gaming blockchain," He has partnered with Oasyx to create a series of coveted JPEGs based on his Virtua Fighter series.

The partnership means that "fans will have access to a limited edition 'VF MAYU' NFT of a special Virtua Fighter character. As faintly grotesque as that sounds, someone somewhere is going to have to shell out a lot of money to get 1000 "Virtua Fighter NFTs" featuring 11 characters from the first three Virtua Fighter games. They will also "serve as the basis for future Metaverse avatars."

Suzuki's role in the project is not entirely clear. He states in a statement that he is "overseeing the development of OASYX's unique worldview," but I am not going to pretend that this is a meaningful overweight statement from where I am sitting and that "innovative technology in the form of blockchain-based NFTs, the Virtua Fighter series and that we are pleased to combine it with the three titles in the Virtua Fighter series". To me, Yutaka Suzuki's role in this endeavor sounds like he was telling Oasyx that they could put his name on this endeavor. Sega does not appear to have done anything more than license "Virtua Fighter."

If there is a silver lining to this, it is that Oasyx is a blockchain system that is proof-of-stake, not proof-of-work. This means that it does not require energy-consuming and environmentally destructive computing power like networks such as Bitcoin. The Virtual Fighter's NFT may be eye-watering, but at least it's not eating the planet. We can probably rest easy on that score.

Last year we said (open in new tab) that NFT had succeeded in bullying its way out of mainstream gaming. But it's always a little disappointing to see the swamp spring up and spit out things like this and Square Enix's awful-looking NFT game (opens in new tab), if not the NFT gold rush that at one time held the C-tops of video game companies worldwide. I'm not sure what to make of it. Also, while I understand that Suzuki seems to have signed a contract where he gets paid for doing almost nothing, it is sad to see once great creators putting their names to this crap.