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DIRECTOR SHUN NAKAMURA LOOKS BACK AT MAKING SAMBA DE AMIGO

How did Samba De Amigo come about?

“Samba De Amigo was conceived in 1999. At that time Japan was experiencing the same kind of music game boom that [took] over Europe and America [in the late Noughties], but I think [Japanese rhythm-action games] were trying a bit too hard to appear cool and therefore were quite difficult to enjoy actually playing. Games are supposed to be fun, but those games were too difficult to approach – I remember thinking, ‘I really want to play music games that are just fun…’ So it was with that in mind – wanting to increase the fun quotient [of Japanese rhythm-action games] – that I produced the plans for Samba De Amigo.”

Why insist on using maracas as the instrument players had to use?

“I think guitars and drums and such difficult instruments are cool, but you have to use your head – you have to think when playing them – and the threshold [for being able to play] is quite high. As far as I was concerned, anyone could easily have some fun just by shaking a pair of maracas, so I felt that maracas were far and away the best choice of instrument for this project.”

Was there much pressure when making the game?

“Samba De Amigo was seen within Sega as being something of an experimental title. We were told that if the arcade location tests were a failure, the project would be cancelled immediately. Because of that, we felt we had to work extremely hard to ensure that it would be a success. The production team on Samba was less than ten people – it was a really small team. And on top of that, most of the developers were newcomers who had no previous game development experience. That’s how experimental [Sega deemed] this project to be…”

How did you choose music tracks?

“It seems that many people initially thought of Samba as a game that specialised in Latin music, but as far as we were concerned there wasn’t any reason for us to be limited to Latin music. Generally speaking, we selected bright, cheerful and fun tracks that would be impossible to play along to nonchalantly – the kind of tunes you have to be really stupid [with the maracas] to enjoy. We also thought it was important to choose music that most people would have heard somewhere, be it on TV or in commercials, even though they might not know the names of the tracks.”