DAYTONA USA
Developer/publisher Sega (AM2) Format Arcade, Saturn Release 1993
This was my first game as director, but I was also a producer on it. It was a more advanced technology than we’d used for
Virtua Racing [Sega’s new Model 2 arcade board], so expectations were higher too. We were developing the chip with General Electrics; they had an office in California, so I went there. We didn’t really talk about the chip very much – we were mainly talking about money – and I had a lot of time to kill. There was a NASCAR circuit nearby, and I could hear the noise from it. The people at GE were worried that I had so much spare time, and got me a ticket.
It was really interesting. All the cars were really flashy, and even though they were just driving around an oval course over and over, people were enjoying it, having so much fun, a lot of energy. Maybe that’s a cultural difference, but comparing it to Formula 1, at NASCAR you can see the cars the whole time. In F1, you’re in your designated seat, the cars drive past in the blink of an eye and then you wait for the next lap. I thought it could become a game one day, maybe, but that was all.
The selling point of the Model 2 board was that we were able to make games more colourful, with better graphics – so I could make a game featuring those kinds of flashy cars. And personally I felt that, while driving games were selling well back then, in Japan they were all F1 games.
“WE WERE TOLD THAT THE GAME WAS TOO HARD, THAT IT WOULD DISAPPEAR FROM THE MARKET”
That was all we had. I didn’t want to create the same games as other people; I wanted to do something different. I’m the same now. I am not the type of person to follow a trend.
This was a game about drifting, which is something both adults and children can enjoy, and we had a lot of female players too. Driving games were one of the biggest genres, with a big target market. We did a lot of testing, and made a lot of adjustments to make something we believed would be fun, but we were doing it for so long that we kind of got lost. Everyone had something they wanted to do, and we had too many ideas [laughs]. The scary thing about making driving games is that there are people that think an idea is great fun, but others don’t agree at all. These aren’t games of pure logic; they are something we feel, so they’re very hard to make. We were told by various people that the game was too hard – that it would disappear from the market, players would walk away. But I thought the challenging difficulty was fun, and that if we made the game easier, it would just be the same kind of game everyone else was making. It was a gamble, but in the end it was up to me; I had to believe in myself. It was a huge seller worldwide.
I was the head of the team for the first time, and there were people on the staff – programmers, sound engineers, etc – doing things I had no experience of, so I wasn’t sure how to communicate with them. I asked lots of people for advice, but concluded that everyone is different, and each individual has his own way. I was young back then, and I had more energy than I do now, so I spent a lot of time on people management. I just remember talking to people, constantly. In doing so they could see I was working really hard, and see my enthusiasm for the game.
I was being promoted much faster than anyone else. I was pleased to be valued, but at the same time, the faster I got promoted, the more senpai [older staff] became my subordinates. There were plenty of senpai on the team, but because I was working so hard on communication, their attitude towards me softened. I was talking so much that I did my work on the actual game after everyone had gone home, after midnight. I remember working right through to the morning.
It’s a weird thing for me to say, maybe, but I always bore in mind the need to be humble. If people thought I was bossy, they wouldn’t listen to me. These days, I have to be confident in my work, but when it comes to building relationships with people, there are no shortcuts. I don’t think I’ve changed that much. I still tend to spend a lot of time with people.