#sega-16

So. Looks like ol' Naka really does got the awful reputation

You could have linked the actual Sega-16 post instead of the quote dunk:

This is an interview conducted by Ken Horowitz of Sega-16, in what are a long line of really great interviews. (Look up his other posts; not only does he translate old interviews he conducts lots of new ones with the old Sega guard. I recall a very juicy and hotly debated interview with Tom Kalinske, and a really fantastic one about Sony Imagesoft's role in creating the 32X)

But this particular interview is with Sega of America's old Product Manager, Mike Fischer, and it's just chock full of lots of really fun and interesting anecdotes. He has a lot of frankly very humble stories about his time at Sega of America handling products like the Game Gear and Pico, but it also leads to a lot of fly-on-the-wall moments where he talks about seeing the Sega America vs. Sega Japan divide from his perspective.

Which is, generally, that Sega of Japan was just as busy fighting with each other as they were with fighting against America. I've long said that Sega is its own worst enemy, and that appears to be more true than I could have ever realized. SOJ consistently thought they knew the right way to do everything and refused to take advice from anyone about anything, including other employees at Sega, and especially from Americans.

One particular story stood out to me, and that's Mike mentioning seeing an early prototype of the Sega Saturn where they wanted to give it kind of an iridescent, sparkling, candy apple style finish (but black, not red). Mike apparently tried to offer advice that you can't really do that with plastic injection molding, because the plastic has flow points that will ruin the pattern. If I remember right, Mike had a background in toys and gadgets, so he knew what he was talking about. The guys in Japan basically told him to piss off... only to later find out he was right and trying to injection mold that kind of glittered plastic looked like garbage.

Notably, yes, he does talk about Yuji Naka more than a few times in this, and it's mostly to mention that dealing with Naka-san was always a nightmare. He tells one particular story of trying to convey that "mature" games like GTA were on the rise in America and maybe the teams in Japan could think about games to target that wave. Yuji Naka blew up at him about how Sega doesn't make "porno" games, only to get smug about it later on and suggest they rename Billy Hatcher to "Giant Cock" because it's a game featuring chickens.

I've previously referenced an old 2002 retrospective interview with Yoshiki Kawasaki (Flicky Designer). Well, you can now read it in English.

Yoshiki Kawasaki: With the thought of “let’s make something more interesting,” I received the next proposal from the lead planner, a single A4 page (laughs).

Sega: That was Flicky?

Yoshiki Kawasaki: Right. The game would have you collect dots in a top-down maze. It was a really simple design document. It said things like: “since the maze can be simple lines, the characters can look simple too. You can leave the background black” (laughs).

Sega: So that means the theme of a mother bird catching her young wasn’t part of the original plan?