The Changing Face Of Sega
“Of course [Sega’s decision to stop Dreamcast production] was a shock, but having said that, it was not entirely a surprise. Sega is a company that really made money from arcades, not the consumer market. The money we made from arcades went to finance the consumer activity and develop another aspect of Sega. So the fact that the Dreamcast didn’t have the rocket start we all hoped for was an early indication, maybe, of things to come. It is true that, as a person from the AM divisions, my view of the consumer division was a bit ‘cold’. While gaming as a whole was going well, at that point we also started to see early signs of the boom fading away. I’m talking here about the entire industry, not just Sega.

“The Japanese bubble burst in 1993 – that was the start of the recession and the economic downturn. At the very same time, the gaming industry was keeping going just as if it was the boom time. In 1999, it was becoming clear that the boom was fading fast for the industry. Coincidentally, we were making SGGG at this very turning point. Near the end of the game, the hero is fired because his company closes, and he finds refuge in a game store near Sega that actually existed! The store manager is Alex Kidd – he was also fired from Sega, when Sonic arrived. The message to the hero is that no matter how bad things look, there is no point in crying over the industry. You have to carry on – just like Alex Kidd, who is working hard.

“As a company, Nintendo is a very special case, because it’s always been successful. Sega was very much about doing what Nintendo was not – we always believed that there was no point in making Mario because Nintendo would do it. There is no point in doing a project that others could do. So, with the state of the industry and the philosophy of Sega’s creativity in mind, SGGG came to light.

“There is one key sequence in the game when our beloved CEO, Mr [Shoichiro] Irimajiri, appears. I wanted him to appear in a very realistic way; I asked the animation company to really make him look as close to real as possible. At first, he looked too much like an animated character – I had to insist that we focus on realism! And then he stepped down! So we ended up using a mosaic effect on his appearance in the game!”

Sticking At It
“When we made the game we had the luxury of explaining in a very light and polite way how the videogame industry was a difficult environment. That was made possible by the relative boom that the industry enjoyed at that time. If today there is one thing I would change it would be to explain why we want to keep working in an industry and keep making games when we’re not getting much profit out of them, when it is rare to get any recognition in the media, etc. I would like to tell users why we still carry on. Japanese movies are seen by Japanese. The mangas have barely evolved since the early times when the master Tezuka Osamu made his. Animation evolved mainly with another master, Miyazaki Hayao.

“Back to the golden age of gaming, Japan was a major source of creativity, so games are a very important creative field for Japan, and I would like to go into more detail about our motivation, even through the hardships. There is one character that evolves throughout the game’s story. The game ends in a very special, perhaps strange way. That character decides to keep making games even after realizing how it is sometimes very challenging. After you make a game such as this, it is hard to leave the industry, and I’m pleased to see that everybody from the team found their place around.”