Sega Forever
Rieko Kodama and Yosuke Okunari explain how developer M2 is keeping Sega’s blue skies alive
Rieko Kodama and Yosuke Okunari on delivering Sega classics to Nintendo Switch
When it comes to the porting of classic games to new systems, M2 is the best in the business. While it has made numerous original games in the past, the studio has become best known in recent years for the excellent work it’s been doing for the Sega Ages range, a series that first began on Saturn and has since moved to both the PS2 and 3DS, and more recently, Nintendo’s Switch. Sega’s recent FES show saw M2 announced as the new developer behind the Mega Drive Mini and a bunch of new Switch ports, including G-loc and Shinobi, so it seemed like the perfect opportunity to sit down with Sega’s Rieko Kodama
and Yosuke Okunari to discover a little bit more about the partnership.
How does Sega decide which games to release under the Sega
Ages brand?
Rieko Kodama: Some of the factors we consider are what was popular in the past, reactions to ports in recent years, survey responses, ideas from the development team and how difficult a game might be to port to keep releases consistent. We always strive to include challenging titles and do our best to be ready to port larger-scale games.
You’ve worked with M2 for over ten years now. What makes M2 the right partner for such an important project like Sega Ages?
Yosuke Okunari: M2 understands the importance of staying faithful to the original form of a title while porting it over. They also place a lot of care in the details – for example, a delay of a few frames between the controller inputs and [it] means a total loss of the game’s charm to them.
Over the past ten years they have sequentially studied the history of Sega’s home consoles and arcade machine system boards. It’s safe to say that they understand the inner workings of the hardware more than anybody else.
Sega Ages
games feature interesting and useful new features, such as automatic mapping in Phantasy Star and extra music in Out
Run. How hard is it to add these features to the code of old games? RK: It differs for each title. We start by pooling together ideas from Sega, M2, the title’s original staff and any other applicable sources. Due to the importance of releasing titles consistently, we first estimate how much additional content we can include in a short period of time before deciding which ideas would be best. The volume of additional content doesn’t always equate to the difficulty of implementing it. If there’s an element in a particular title that we feel is important to include, we’ll adjust the schedule of all titles in