YES WE BUDOCAN!
HOW EA FORCING SEGA’S HAND LED TO A BEAUTIFUL FRIENDSHIP
■ Budokan was released on the Mega Drive in the autumn of 1990 – and it was a high-quality conversion: the controls were perfectly adapted to the gamepad, Miyuki Hirose finally made noises appropriate to their female body type, and (exclusive to this version) there was even a storyline! The interesting thing about this version, however, is how it came about. In the early days of the Mega Drive, Electronic Arts was not an officially licensed Sega developer for the console. Of course, this didn’t stop EA founder Trip Hawkins from importing a few systems after the console’s release in Japan and having them analysed and reverse-engineered by a team led by Jim Nitchals and Steve Hayes in a so-called ‘clean room’ process. One team stripped the Mega Drive to its bones, while a second team documented the functionality of the components based on observations and tests, and then they created manuals and development tools from the results. The important thing was that the two teams never talked directly to each other or shared their experiences; all communication went through a specialist team of lawyers who ensured that no copyrighted information was used, thus keeping the legal room clean. The result of this complex process, which took more than a year, was that EA was able to build its own Mega Drive development kit and use it to create software for the console – without Sega being able to do anything about it. However, Trip Hawkins was far too smart a businessman to take the risk of being banned from selling software by Sega in the injunctions that were likely to follow, even if he was not actually legally vulnerable. So he decided to take the high road. With several finished games in his briefcase, he met a Sega delegation in May 1990 and presented them with a fait accompli: either EA should be made an official licensing partner, or EA could start distributing their own games the next day without Sega seeing a penny of it. Sega swallowed its frustration, the licensing deal was done on Trip’s terms – and Budokan was the first result of this masterstroke, appearing in stores around the world in the autumn of 1990, along with a conversion of Bullfrog’s Populous. By the time John Madden Football was released in the holiday season that year, it was clear to everyone that Sega had made the right decision in making Electronic Arts the first third-party developer for the Mega Drive. Even if not exactly by choice.