Jul 09, 2019 23:00:00

An interview movie that spans over 1 hour 30 minutes is released to the name creator who supported Sega's last game hard 'dream cast'

by

Joe Haupt

Sega's last home game hardware released in 1998 is Dreamcast . A YouTube channel ' Archipel ', which covers Japanese creators, has released a documentary movie in which the creators of Dreamcast's masterpiece titles were asked the back of 'Creating game software for Dreamcast'.

The movie is a two-part movie, with eight creators talking from Dreamcast release to game production. You can check out 'A Dream Cast-Part 1' from the following.

A Dream Cast-Part 1-YouTube


Yuka Saito , who sent ' Siemann ' to the world, was invited one day by Kenji Iino who was known for his ' D's Table ' and ' Enemy Zero '. It was revealed that the Dreamcast was being developed when we were having a meal with three people, including Mr. Shoichiro Ide , who was the vice president of Sega at that time.

Seaman is a game that breeds creatures that speak human language in the water tank, and boasts top sales of approximately 400,000 in the software released by Dreamcast.

The main feature of Seaman is that it enables voice recognition by using a microphone that can be inserted into the controller's memory slot. It was a time when the technology of speech recognition had not progressed so much, but it became a topic of advanced work together with '

Pikachu Genki de chuu ' which was released for NINTENDO 64 just before.

Many of the materials produced by Seaman are in PDF, but some are still at hand. In the movie, there is a scene where Mr. Saito looks back at the material collection, but the contents were all handwritten.

Although Seaman was originally a project that Saito had been warming up since before the Dream Cast, it was judged that it was difficult with the technology at that time, and it was said that she had been in storage. However, it seems that Mr. Saito created this Seaman as a title for Dreamcast, as it may be possible if it is the performance of Dreamcast.

A sketch of Seaman by Saito. The content of the game is like 'Electronic Pet Training', and Seaman, who makes cynical expressions on the Buddha side, has gained popularity from people who do not usually play games. However, since most of the people who purchased Dreamcast for playing Seaman were non-gamers, Saito has said that he did not lead to the purchase of software other than Seaman.

Rieko Kodama , who designed and produced many masterpiece games such as 'The Ninja Princess ' and ' Alex Kid's Miracle World '.

In particular,

Phantasy Star is one of Sega's most popular series, as it is still offered as Phantasy Star Online 2 .

'

Eternal Arcadia ' created by such Kodama is a role playing game (RPG) released in 2000 as a title for Dreamcast. It was revealed that the development of Dreamcast was still completely confidential, and it started development.

In addition to the regular edition, the '@barai edition' was also sold, which is cheap, available for purchase, can be played halfway, and if you want to go further you can download it via the Internet. It is a business model that is not uncommon in 2019, but in 2000 it became a topic as a groundbreaking idea.

As the producer of '

Crazy Taxi ', Kenji Ogino was originally involved in the task of creating arcade machines for game centers.

The following is the screen of '

Top Skater ' produced by Mr. Hino for the first time in the late 90's.

Dreamcast was announced at the timing when the 'crazy taxi' was announced for arcades around 2000.

Because Dreamcast is compatible with the professional board

NAOMI , it has the advantage that it is easy to port arcade games.

Crazy Taxi was an arcade game that adopted the NAOMI board for the first time in the 3rd AM Research and Development Department (known as AM3 Lab) of Sega. The Dreamcast version was released in January 2000, and the sequel '

Crazy Taxi 2 ' was also released in Dreamcast in May 2001.

Mr. Masayoshi Kikuchi, who was the producer of the first '

Ryu ga Gotoku '

After joining Sega in 1995, he participated in the production of the

Pazad Lagoon Tswai, a shooting game for Sega Saturn.

“

Jet Set Radio ”, created by Mr. Kikuchi and released in 2000, is an action game in which you can make tricks or write graffiti on the wall while you are going through the city with skate shoes. It is one of the award winning masterpiece titles with its intense design and action. According to Mr. Kikuchi, he was thinking of incorporating street culture into the game with the idea of 'making something that young people can say cool to realize a motif that was not in the game market so far' Of.

Mr.

Tetsu Okano who is active as a manga artist in the name of 'Zorge Ichikura' joined Sega in 1992. I was in charge of drafting and producing ' SGGG (Segagaga) '.

Segagaga, which was released after the announcement of the Dreamcast discontinuation in 2001, is an RPG called “Sega will be pulled to control the game industry”. 'Real departments and events are models of game events,' 'Games released by Sega appear in the past,' 'RPG is a registered trademark of Bandai Co., Ltd.' every time the word 'RPG' comes out. A message comes out, 'Segagaga is a book that is packed with metafiction, brutality and bad riding.

Mr. Okano has made it thinking that 'I will do it so thoroughly that metafictional games will not come out in the future'. Initially it was a mail-order exclusive software, but a general sales version was also released, with some data corrected later.

Such Sega Gaga has a budget of only 30,000 yen. The project document is shown in the movie, but the development period is 6 months with 'Anyway short, and low cost'.

Mr. Okano who is a game hardware fan who recognizes both himself and others, referring to the color of Sega hardware, expressed that 'Sega has returned to sanity at the dream cast'. Regarding this, Mr. Kikuchi also stated that 'Sega had been supported by core game fans until now, but Sega was going to be fashionable in the Dreamcast,' and a general audience that Sega is not only a core gamer. It is understood that we were going to plan deployment aiming at also.

Mr.

Tetsuya Mizuguchi who joined Sega in 1990.

Among the works produced by Mr. Mizuguchi, one of the most famous is '

Space Channel 5 ' in the rhythm game.

It is '

Rez ' of a new sense shooter that combines music, light and vibration. According to Mr. Mizuguchi, Space Channel 5 pursues the bright side of music, and Rez pursues the deeper and immersive side of music.

At the corner of Mr. Mizuguchi's office, a Synastasia suit, which was developed to enhance the sense of immersion, was decorated with '

Rez Infinite ', the latest work in the 'Rez' series.

Mr. Mizuguchi testified that he had been communicating with many creators such as Iino, Saito, and Kikuchi while having a meal, and was often engaged in discussions, advice and consultation.

Mr. Hiroshi Inuchi, who joined Konami in 1989 and founded

Treasure in 1992.

Treasure has released a lot of software for Sega game hardware.

The representative of this is Treasure's first software '

Gunster Heroes ' released for Mega Drive.

Such treasure has released the game for the arcade. For example, the following game was released as an arcade game in 1998, and it is a shooting game '

Rientian Silver Gun ' ported to Sega Saturn.

And, what Treasure released for arcade in 2001 is '

Ikaruga '. It is a vertical scroll shooting game that contains elements like puzzles that go forward while switching between two colors, white and black, according to Iuchi, 'The elements are being drawn out while using the reflection of the radiant silver gun and remaining It was developed with the concept of subtraction of extracting and making things. ' At the stage of the arcade, Iuchi-san thought that “I saw some parts that seemed complicated to play a bit and didn't get much play,” but I was supported by the voices of “I want you to play with Dreamcast”. , That the full version was released in Dreamcast in 2002.

Mr.

Hiroaki Setoriyama, who joined Namco in 1993, became director of 'Mach Breakers' shortly after joining the company, and is also involved in Namco's 3D fighting game ' Tekken '. Mr. Setoriyama is said to be a leading figure who strongly instilled the concept of 'motion design' into the game industry at the beginning of the 3D game for home use.

Such Mr. Setoriyama will be in charge of design and direction of 3D fighting game. At that time the Tekken series was deployed on the PlayStation ...

Mr. Setoriyama thought that he wanted to develop the arcade '

Seoul caliber' with Dreamcast which is Sega's hard. As a result of thorough adjustment with the spirit of 'doing more than for business use', the Dream cast version of Seoul Caliber has received acclaim from all over the world in a blink of an eye, becoming a popular series such as the release of new works after 20 years You are

Dreamcast was a system in which a memory for storing game data was attached to the controller, but there was also a 'visual memory' with an LCD screen and buttons on this memory. Mr. Setoriyama said he wanted to make full use of this visual memory when porting Seoul Caliber to Dreamcast.

In addition, it is said that Mr. Setoriyama also drew the dot picture of the screen which goes into visual memory.

In addition, Mr. Setoriyama told with gestures that it is possible to operate in full even using Dreamcast's dedicated '

fishing controller ' used to play a fishing experience game. .

In Part 2, each creator talks about the end of the Dreamcast, where the loss of the market has become more intense with the advent of PlayStation 2.

A Dream Cast-Part 2-YouTube


Dream cast that had many attractive elements such as 'equipped modem for Internet connection' 'adopts GD-ROM for easy porting of business use boards' and ' start sound of composition by Ryuichi Sakamoto'. The advertising producer is Yasumoto Akimoto, who has appointed a copy of the newspaper “Sega is falling down?”, And Yukawa Yuichi, who served as Executive Director and Deputy General Manager of Consumer Business Headquarters of SEGA, for CM. It became a topic to develop advertising strategies such as the Executive Series.

However, the cost per unit is very high, and Sega, who is strong in software development, was thinking of a business strategy centered on software. Despite the fact that the price at the time of release of Dreamcast's 29,800 yen was sold but there was little profit, it was reduced to 19,900 yen without cost reduction in one year from the sale, so every single car sold A deficit of about 10,000 yen has come out.

In addition, in the CM of the Yukawa Executive Series, the grueling content of “Sega yeah!” And “Let's go back and do press!” Became a topic, but in particular PlayStation 2 was released in 2000, The processing performance of 6.2 GFLOPS, which is overwhelmingly higher than the Dream Cast of 1.4 G

FLOPS , is compatible with playback of DVD-VIDEO, and the Dream Cast is forced to struggle considerably. As Saito says, 'The PlayStation 2 was very smart and high-density game hardware,' the disadvantage of the Dreamcast was also apparent to the eyes of creators of that time.

In addition, PlayStation 2 had backward compatibility that the PlayStation software of the previous model can play, but Dreamcast is one of the big cause of losing the fact that it was not possible to play the software of Sega Saturn. This was not clear in the hardware design specification, and it was the result of choosing cost over compatibility. There were also production problems of the main unit and lack of killer titles, and it was not possible to regain market share from PlayStation 2, and the production of Dreamcast was announced in January 2001. It was only two months later that Sega's Chairman Ogawa, who has fully supported the Dreamcast development project, passed away.

There are a variety of other valuable testimonials, so if you are interested please take a look at the main story. Part 1 and Part 2 have a total length of 1 hour and 30 minutes, but it is worth watching from the beginning to the end if you once held the Dreamcast controller.