Noriyoshi Ohba x Rieko Kodama (2001)

Rieko Kodama - Designer/Planner/Producer
Noriyoshi Ohba - Planner/CEO (Overworks)

Kodama: When I joined Sega, the game development department was broadly divided into three sections: the "Software" section with the programmers, the Design Room, and Planning. Sound wasn't yet a separate department either; the people creating sound were in the same section as the software team. Each team worked on both arcade games and console games for systems like the SG-1000. Even in the Design Room where I was assigned, besides game design, we also created things like packaging and advertisements, and we also designed arcade cabinets.

My debut work was Champion Boxing, for the SG-1000 I believe. I'd been working at Sega for six months when I was asked if I'd like to try drawing something. It was more of a collaborative effort, learning alongside a senior designer. I was completely lost at the time, and since I'd originally gone to graphic design school, I actually wanted to do graphic production work. Advertising work was scarce back then, so I was also interested in doing things like the instruction cards or pop-up displays for arcade cabinets. But that was just around the time that home consoles like the SG-1000 were starting to appear, so Sega said, "Why don't you try doing that instead?" I think about four designers were assigned, and each of us was given a theme… in any event, it was more of a training period.

It was Yu Suzuki who showed me the ropes and taught me everything. Back then four people would be assigned to a single development, so ideally one designer would be enough, but I just couldn't manage on my own. I ended up getting help partway through. That was my first development. I believe the arcade version of Ninja Princess was my second project.

Ohba: That was still before the 1-megabyte era, right?

Kodama: Way less than that--try 16K or 32K. (laughs) I think you could only have a single sprite, with just two colors.

Ohba: I joined Sega after the Mark III era, in April 1987. By then, the company was already split into two teams: Team 1 for arcade games and Team 2 for console games. I joined Team 2. So I've been working on console games ever since. Come to think of it, during my initial training right after joining, I even sold software at a department store.

Kodama: Yeah, I remember that! (laughs)

Ohba: I rang up sales on the register and wrapped them too. During my training, we were selling the Mark III's Rocky, but it really didn't sell well back then… it was sad. (laughs)

My first involvement in development was on the Mark III's Super Wonder Boy: Monster World. It was a 2-megabyte game. Since it launched in January 1988, it hadn't even been a year since I joined the company. (laughs) Back then, we somehow managed to make games in about six months. My role was planning. Since it was a port, I wrote the planning docs and additional materials all by myself. There were two programmers and maybe one sound person? Plenty of designers, though. We just powered through it all at once and finished in one big burst of effort.

Kodama: Yeah. Design was mainly handled by about two people, with others helping out as needed.

Ohba: There were five or six female designers too.

Kodama: Interestingly, the female staff were almost exclusively designers!

Early Development Tools

Ohba: For the graphics, back then we used light pens to draw one dot at a time on the monitor. (laughs)

Kodama: Yeah but the light pen itself was revolutionary for us. Before that, we drew on paper. The light pen setups were called Digitizers, but when I joined, there weren't enough for everyone.

Ohba: Also, we used ROMs to transfer data, remember? We'd burn our data onto EPROMs and hand them directly to the programmers.

Kodama: And if a ROM pin broke, we'd just solder it back on. (laughs)

Ohba: When there was data we didn't need anymore, we'd line all the chips up and use this machine to erase them all at once. (laughs)

Later, when the Mega Drive started, naturally each programmer had their own computer. That was right around the time we switched from the PC-88 to the PC-98. Data transfer switched to floppy disks, and designers' tools changed from digitizer light pens to tablets. But planning was still done entirely by hand. There might be one word processor-like PC shared among several people.

I did everything by hand. (laughs) I wrote the planning documents and spec sheets for games like The Super Shinobi and Bare Knuckle by hand too. It would be a long time before Macintosh computers were introduced and used for writing planning documents.

The Mega Drive Arrives!

Kodama: The work that stands out in my memory from that time is definitely Altered Beast. We worked ourselves to death to make it in time for the Mega Drive launch. The development period was three months… I was also working on Alex Kidd in the Enchanted Castle. We started developing using test boards which were the size of a tatami mat! It wasn't even clear to us how many or which colors we'd be able to use, so the designers had a tough time with the color reproduction and figuring out which areas to emphasize. And yet, we still managed to finish it in three months.

Ohba: I believe it was around the Mega Drive era when developments started to take a year for a single game.

Kodama: That's right. Before that, as a designer, in a busy year I might work on about six titles a year.

Ohba: I made The Super Shinobi and Bare Knuckle. When I was doing planning, I could handle maybe two… three titles at most? But when the MegaROM came out for the Mark III, I couldn't handle three titles in parallel anymore.

I was really happy when we switched to the Mega Drive, because the hardware had evolved significantly. You could have two scroll planes, and sprites wouldn't disappear so easily even when placed side by side.

Kodama: Sprites not disappearing was the best part. Plus, you could use a lot more colors.

Ohba: On top of that, when we were making The Super Shinobi, we were constantly thinking about how to exceed those limits with clever tricks and programming. Like making it look like there were three or even four scrolling layers when there were only two.

Kodama: Using line scrolling.

Ohba: Exactly, exactly. We'd make sprites that looked like a single scroll layer. "Whoa, there's five scrolling layers there!" (laughs)

Kodama: Initially, management was really insistent and blunt about wanting more parallax scrolling. "Just make something that shows off the multiple scrolling layers!" So we didn't pay heed to how difficult it would be… (laughs)

Ohba: Back when we were making Shinobi, that's all we thought about. You know that monster scene? It looks like it's drawn on the scroll plane, but we actually did it with sprites. So there were two proper scrolling layers behind it, and it was like, "BAM! How do you like that!" (laughs) That was our attitude back then with the Mega Drive. It really was like "whoa, look how much we can cram in!"

Kodama: In those early days though, we could do all this crazy stuff and the release dates would be set and everything, but the hardware boards themselves keep getting delayed. (laughs)

Ohba: That happened every single time, right? (laughs) Every time we switched hardware.

Kodama: But the difference between the Mega Drive and earlier consoles was truly groundbreaking. It was about as shocking as when polygons became usable.

Ohba: It was huge, really. I was in the 6th Development Team (at the time), and our department worked on a lot of action games. For example, the Mickey Mouse series like Castle of Illusion, and then Strider Hiryu. The reason we made so many action games was because the American Genesis was doing well, so there was a push to create titles that would sell well in both America and Japan.

Kodama: During this era, I was working on Michael Jackson's Moonwalker and Golden Axe.

Ohba: Sega really focused on action games back then, didn't they? Action games, driving games, arcade ports. That's why people said we were "weak at RPGs" back then. (laughs)

The Struggle with the Mega CD

Ohba: The latter half of the Mega Drive era for us was defined by the Mega CD.

Kodama: I wasn't working on the Mega CD. I helped with Sonic the Hedgehog, and after that, it was Phantasy Star IV.

Ohba: For the Mega CD, we created games like 3×3 EYES and Dark Wizard, but developing for the Mega CD was tough. First off, the memory capacity increased dramatically. Since these were in-house developments for our own hardware, the thinking was "let's make something that really leverages this hardware's capabilities." But the question was, how do we actually utilize all that space? Up until then, even the biggest projects were made by teams of maybe 10 people. But now we were suddenly working with CDs. The sheer volume of work became overwhelmingly difficult to keep up with. That was the biggest challenge.

In addition, unlike ROM cartridge media, reducing load times and such took a lot of effort, right? That was incredibly tough. Suddenly we were working with teams of 10, 20, 30 or more people, and it was around this time that we started approaching the scale of our current developments.

Kodama: Every time the hardware changed, there was a huge demand for games that would utilize that hardware's strengths. That applied to planning, and the art side was also heavily pushed in this direction too. Despite having massively more art to create, if the assets could be displayed on-screen as-is, then it wasn't too bad. But ultimately we always had to make a bunch of adjustments. The burden in that area didn't lessen, but the sheer amount of art required just kept increasing.

Ohba: Back then, RAM was small too. Load times weren't as fast as they are now… I imagine they struggled a lot with Panic, too.

Phantasy Star IV

Kodama: The way the PSIV development began is that four designers, of which I was one, wanted to work on a project where we would create everything from scratch ourselves, including the planning and scenario. And since we were going to make this game all by ourselves, we thought, why not make it a Phantasy Star game, which we all wanted to do anyway. There were four programmers, and about ten people in total on the team.

I helped out a bit with backgrounds on the first Sonic the Hedgehog, but I found immense joy in building a game as a team, working alongside Yuji Naka and everyone. I realized how fun game development could be when planners and designers unite like this.

Before that, designers rarely stayed with a project from start to finish. Even on the original Phantasy Star, I'd weigh in on character design and scenarios, but for the most part that work was considered the designer's domain. With PSIV, I wanted to be involved in everything, including selling the software and creating the merchandise. Of course, the scale of our developments wasn't so huge back then. (laughs)

I was still drawing as a designer myself on PSIV, so I was doing background art while also handling team leader duties. That's when I first started doing things like bug checking, and supervising the sound from start to finish. It was probably possible because the games themselves were much smaller-scale compared to today.

Working as a Producer

Ohba: With the Saturn, my work shifted more towards production and direction. I was heavily involved from the Saturn's start. I worked on Clockwork Knight, Riglord Saga, Riglord Saga 2, and World Advanced Daisenryaku. After that, it was J.League Pro Soccer Club, I think.

Kodama: I joined the RPG Production Department around the time we started Magic Knight Rayearth. That department was created because Sega was considered weak in RPGs, so they formed a dedicated section. It was established just before the Saturn launch and merged into CS2 Lab (the precursor to Overworks) right after Rayearth's release.

Ohba: We started developing Dreamcast games around late 1997. We were already working on Skies of Arcadia then.

Kodama: We were, with about five people. It was initially planned for the Saturn.

Ohba: Then we decided to make it for the Dreamcast and started over from scratch.

Kodama: The Saturn version was still in the planning phase, with the scenario and characters just starting to take shape.

The Reason We Keep Making Games

Kodama: Back in the day, games weren't really accepted as legitimate entertainment, you know? They were still seen as "something you find in arcades"… My family ran a coffee shop, and we had games like Galaxian there, so I was exposed to video games pretty early on. But I never thought about making them myself.

But I was captivated by RPGs in particular, the idea of creating an entire world, just like in TV or movies. I wanted to build my own world from scratch, and then let players roam around freely in it, in a highly interactive way. I didn't really start thinking about that concretely until after I joined Sega, but now I'm living the dream!

The tough part of being employed for a hardware maker like Sega was that with each new hardware generation, we had to create something that leveraged its capabilities. But even so, I've enjoyed making these games, and thanks to Sega I've been doing this for 17 years now. (laughs) Being able to handle everything--drawing, creating stories--totally on my own was the most fun and rewarding part for me. That's probably why I've kept at it. Plus, in the console wars Sega was always kind of the runner-up (laughs), so we worked hard with that underdog spirit. I kept thinking, "I'll show them! This game on this hardware is going to change everything!"

Ohba: Yeah. I felt that way too.

Kodama: Somewhere deep down, I've always held onto that sentiment. That's why I keep hoping to create something from the ground up that everyone will enjoy playing. I want to keep pouring my heart into making works like Skies of Arcadia.

Ohba: When I joined Sega as a new employee, I knew nothing. And as I worked, I learned without even realizing it. Now I look at Sega and it's this huge company with so many people, but by the same token its development talent pool is incredibly deep. After all, you can't make a great game alone; having amazing staff around you makes a huge difference. In that sense, I think Sega is truly outstanding. I believe that the environment shapes the person. Thanks to the culture at Sega everyone naturally worked very hard and was constantly striving to learn more. When I first joined, I had nothing to compare it to, so I didn't think much of it, but looking back now, I'm really glad I ended up at Sega.

From here on out, we'll have to make the difficult decision of which hardware platform(s) to develop for, but back in the day, we didn't have to worry about that--and that was the good part. Back then, it was just, "Alright, next up is the Mega Drive!" (laughs) All I ever wanted was to create original games that could only be played on Sega hardware… now, I want to focus on creating great Sega software, the kind that only we can make. While I've gradually taken on more non-development work in my personal career, I still speak up about development matters. As President of Overworks, I might be the most vocal head of any game company. (laughs)

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