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I’d like to see how the naysayers from back in the day would react to sight of people dancing to rhythm games (laughs). If I try to think back on that era, I consider it a period in which the thought process and taste of the Japanese population underwent a large shift.
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“Nobody would do something this embarrassing in public”, “What are women supposed to do, they can’t play this if they’re wearing a skirt”… we heard these kind of opinions all the time. Though self-assertion is natural for Americans, this was a time when Japanese people would tend to keep their distance, and held the motto of “hard work, perseverance, and guts” over frivolity. I don’t think anyone believes this now, but at the time there was a common belief that Japanese people are too shy to straddle a plastic bike, which was a huge concern for us. Suzuki: The planning phase for the game was still rough going, though. I wonder if it was just an environment ripe for something new. – Making a racing game that used a huge cabinet during the era of tabletop cabinets was a pretty bold concept. So from a personal standpoint as well as a business standpoint, I wanted something new, something different than what arcade games had been up until now. That they were filled with tobacco smoke, or that arcade games were used by baristas to gamble with… those kind of negative images. Arcades had a reputation as being a gathering spot for hooligans. Arcade games at the time were typically in the tabletop cabinet format, which has something of an underground vibe to it. – And then after that came the pioneer in full-body experience games, Hang-On. There weren’t enough designers, so I ended up drawing some material myself as well. Music was handled via orders to the sound division, so that makes around 4 or 5 people in one team. Beyond that, there was one other designer and a design assistant. At the time there was only one planner acting as my superior, and I worked on both programming and planning. So even though Champion Boxing was the first home console game I directed, it was also the first arcade game.
#ROAD FIGHTER SEGA SG 1000 SERIES#
We had originally created it exclusively for the SG series (the Sega SG-3000 and SG-1000, both released in 1983), but it ended up looking good enough that we decided to sell an arcade version, and completely sold through the production run. Around a year after I joined Sega, I was made project leader for it. Suzuki: The first project I worked as lead on wasn’t actually Hang-On, but Champion Boxing. – So, the first project you worked on as director was Hang-On? Nowadays I have multiple computers to myself. Every day, all five of us would settle on a timetable for computer usage, and you could only claim two hours at a time. When I joined Sega, it was 4 people per table, and 5 people shared a single computer. For instance, in America, working spaces are divided by partitions, and the idea of 7 square meters per employee was unthinkable. Sega was the kind of company where you’d hear English phrases like that thrown around all over the place.īut because this was a time before the internet, we really had no familiarity with the style of American business. Suzuki: In American business, you’ll see documents referred to as “slips” rather than “papers”, so it’s a document pertaining to a certain matter of discussion. A guy named Yoshii was the head of software, and together they were known as the demonic Satou and the merciful Yoshii (laughs).īecause Sega was originally a foreign company, there was a lot of English terminology thrown around. At the time, president Satou served as the head of hardware, and I was in the same division as him when I was working on development.
#ROAD FIGHTER SEGA SG 1000 SOFTWARE#
Suzuki: When I first joined, hardware and software were all a single department.
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To start, what were things like at Sega when you joined the company in the early 80s? – Even though you’re best known for the Virtua Fighter series, I’d like to go a bit further back than that. A chaotic mix of software and hardware on the first floor As of 2001, is also managing director at Sega AM2. Took on an executive role in 1998 as he continued work as AM2’s head. Worked as programmer and producer on Sega’s large-scale experience games, and later caused a global boom with his work on the Virtua Fighter series. Sega AM2 managing director and senior executive manager.