Published in Sega Arcade History (February 27, 2002). One of a number of interviews with key figures in Sega’s arcade titles featured in the book. This one is with then-Sega AM2 department head Yu Suzuki, and discusses the history of Sega’s large-scale experience arcade games.

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The careful simulation behind success

A chaotic mix of software and hardware on the first floor

– Even though you’re best known for the Virtua Fighter series, I’d like to go a bit further back than that. To start, what were things like at Sega when you joined the company in the early 80s?

Suzuki: When I first joined, hardware and software were all a single department. At the time, president Satou served as the head of hardware, and I was in the same division as him when I was working on development. A guy named Yoshii was the head of software, and together they were known as the demonic Satou and the merciful Yoshii (laughs).

Because Sega was originally a foreign company, there was a lot of English terminology thrown around. Do you know what an “issue slip” is?

– What does it mean?

Suzuki: In American business, you’ll see documents referred to as “slips” rather than “papers”, so it’s a document pertaining to a certain matter of discussion. Sega was the kind of company where you’d hear English phrases like that thrown around all over the place.

But because this was a time before the internet, we really had no familiarity with the style of American business. For instance, in America, working spaces are divided by partitions, and the idea of 7 square meters per employee was unthinkable. When I joined Sega, it was 4 people per table, and 5 people shared a single computer. Every day, all five of us would settle on a timetable for computer usage, and you could only claim two hours at a time. Nowadays I have multiple computers to myself. Times sure have changed.

– So, the first project you worked on as director was Hang-On?

Suzuki: The first project I worked as lead on wasn’t actually Hang-On, but Champion Boxing. Around a year after I joined Sega, I was made project leader for it. We had originally created it exclusively for the SG series (the Sega SG-3000 and SG-1000, both released in 1983), but it ended up looking good enough that we decided to sell an arcade version, and completely sold through the production run. So even though Champion Boxing was the first home console game I directed, it was also the first arcade game. At the time there was only one planner acting as my superior, and I worked on both programming and planning. Beyond that, there was one other designer and a design assistant. Music was handled via orders to the sound division, so that makes around 4 or 5 people in one team. There weren’t enough designers, so I ended up drawing some material myself as well.

– And then after that came the pioneer in full-body experience games, Hang-On.

Suzuki: That’s right. Arcade games at the time were typically in the tabletop cabinet format, which has something of an underground vibe to it. Arcades had a reputation as being a gathering spot for hooligans. That they were filled with tobacco smoke, or that arcade games were used by baristas to gamble with… those kind of negative images. So from a personal standpoint as well as a business standpoint, I wanted something new, something different than what arcade games had been up until now.

– Making a racing game that used a huge cabinet during the era of tabletop cabinets was a pretty bold concept. I wonder if it was just an environment ripe for something new.

Suzuki: The planning phase for the game was still rough going, though. I don’t think anyone believes this now, but at the time there was a common belief that Japanese people are too shy to straddle a plastic bike, which was a huge concern for us. Though self-assertion is natural for Americans, this was a time when Japanese people would tend to keep their distance, and held the motto of “hard work, perseverance, and guts” over frivolity. “Nobody would do something this embarrassing in public”, “What are women supposed to do, they can’t play this if they’re wearing a skirt”… we heard these kind of opinions all the time.

If I try to think back on that era, I consider it a period in which the thought process and taste of the Japanese population underwent a large shift. I’d like to see how the naysayers from back in the day would react to sight of people dancing to rhythm games (laughs). I don’t think anyone could’ve imagined that the future of arcades would look like this. We actually wanted the tilting of the bike to be automated via electronics, but we couldn’t spend that much money on a risky plan under the social climate of the time. So it ended up being done via manpower.

– How many people worked on Hang-On?

Suzuki: There really weren’t many of us on the Hang-On staff. I did most of the programming myself, but there were two other programmers. Other than that, I think there were three designers. We also brought in someone who could make music to handle the game’s sound, so in all there were around 8 people. Compared to modern projects, it seems like nothing.

Bringing the world of PC simulation to arcade cabinets

– Hang-On was developed for a new arcade board, right?

Suzuki: That’s right. At the time, we generally had a new board made for each game. So we would frequently be working on a game’s development when the board it was meant to run on hadn’t actually been created yet. We’d say “develop the game without a board, sell the cabinet two months later”. I didn’t have much experience at the time so I had no idea whether we could do it, but at the time I said “all I can do is try, but I really don’t think it’s possible”.

So, I used the PC-8800 I bought as a student to create a simulated version of the game with Basic commands. Of course, using the built-in functions like PAINT and LINE were slow, so I had to make my own faster graphics library. At the time people said stuff like “there’s not a single PC88 application in the world that runs this fast” (laughs). Instead of a bike, it had this pole-like thing in the middle of the screen, which would tilt as you took corners. We simulated stuff like how far it should tilt if you take a corner at a certain speed.

So, it was only natural that we used a PC to simulate it. We didn’t have a board to use, after all. Any time new plans came up for the game, we would go and simulate them on PC. Those proposals ended up becoming specs. So we knew they were all feasible. If you want to figure out whether or not you can do something, you’ll know once you test it on a computer.

With this, we were also able to fine-tune the hardware specs we needed. Once we finished our software simulation, we’d discuss what kind of hardware we needed to implement it. So, we’d generally be able to anticipate what problems would arise, to a certain degree, and could know what kind of hardware framework to ask for from the start.

It was the same way when we were working on Virtua Fighter. Both in office and at home, we would run simulations on a laptop. We had to simplify it to wireframes to get it to run on a laptop, but in essence, it was the same kind of animations. So when we made it into a retail product, we already knew how many polygons it needed to display.

– Were there any other notable difficulties during the development of Hang-On?

Suzuki: Developing Hang-On involved considering not just gameplay and design, but safety as well. We needed to design the cabinet so that children wouldn’t be able to get their fingers caught in it, putting up plastic boards and things like that. The parts we used for the cabinet were another tough thing. We had figured it would be okay if we just used actual motorcycle parts, but we were totally wrong. Real motorcycles aren’t designed to be constantly ridden from morning to night. But day in and day out, Hang-On would be played from when the shop opens to when it closes. So we quickly realized we couldn’t use real motorcycle parts. Hang-On’s parts would wear out five times as fast.

We decided from the start to include 2 or 3 brake cables in the game’s tool set. If we didn’t, it would be a lot of trouble when one of them fails. If someone in Florida calls us to say their brake cable wore out, getting a Sega employee over there would have massive labor and travel costs. Things like including the cable in advance were the result of our trial-and-error process to handle any issues that may arise. After repeated business and sales and testing, we reached a point where we could sell the product as just one package.

From a technical standpoint, the screen display gave us a lot of trouble. Because of the buffer used at the time, you could only have a fixed number of sprites on a single horizontal line. You couldn’t just put anything you wanted up there. If you line up 6 or 7 trees horizontally, they’ll start disappearing. So, we tried to consider how we could make it seem like there was a lot more on screen than there actually was. When we thought on it, we recalled the sensation where if you wave a finger in front of a fluorescent light, it will look like multiple fingers. So we used a similar optical illusion to make it seem like there were a lot of trees passing by when you were going at high speed, but it was still a struggle.

It’s always nerve-wracking to put something you spent so much time on out into the world. The first time we put Hang-On out at an arcade, there was this lady who looked like Akiko from Kyojin no Hoshi who we were secretly watching at a distance. “Oh, here she comes, here she comes. But she’s just walking around it without getting on! Oh, she’s riding it! But she didn’t put any money in. What’s she even doing…”

We were so happy when we saw the first person play it, we wanted to take them out to dinner and let them order whatever they wanted off the menu. But of course, having strange men show up and invite you to dinner for playing a video game was pretty sketchy, so we didn’t actually do that (laughs).

As long as we’re Sega, we’ll keep working in arcades

Suzuki: After Hang-On, we kept working on the kind of projects we wanted to make. That’s just the kind of environment Sega was. We didn’t end up using a motor with Hang-On, but we were able to get our chance to create a moving arcade cabinet with Space Harrier. And then from making a cabinet that could move along two axes with After Burner, we finally made it to the R-360 which could spin in all directions.

– And on the road of developing full-body experience games, you transitioned to polygons as well.

Suzuki: Once we reached the R-360, we didn’t really have any way to continue along the path of full-body experience games. But, we did move on to brainstorming new experiences that we could create using illusions to reach even greater heights. Arcades simply didn’t have the electrical capacity to support anything with more dramatic movement than the R-360. We would have to use hydraulics, but that would cause costs to spike. A large-scale theme park like Universal Studios could do it, but an arcade would have problems handling that kind of operating cost. So that left us with the option of thrilling people with illusions.

For instance, you could create a sealed-off cabinet, and put the player inside at an incline. Because the cabinet is sealed, the player has no way of knowing how far inclined exactly they are. But players will feel gravity directly with their own weight, so you can tilt them up to 35 degrees to give the feeling of accelerating or decelerating. And then there’s also the extent to which video can throw off a person’s balance. It’s possible to make a normal person feel like they can’t stand up straight with video alone.

But in the time that we were figuring out these sort of illusions, the game industry had changed. While we were still pinning down polygonal games, home console hardware was rapidly developing. And so, we reached the difficult period for arcades that we’re currently in.

– People say the arcade world is on a downwards spiral, but where do you think things go from here?

Suzuki: Try recalling what happened with bowling and billiards. Bowling alleys saw a massive boom where one day they were there and the next day they were gone, but the industry as a whole is still hanging in there to this day. Billiards was the same way. I think the difficult times arcade games are facing is something along these lines.

Arcades aren’t going to just disappear off the face of the planet. It’s a tough period for arcades, but I think little by little, they’ll return to how they were. It’s difficult when you have arcade companies shutting down, but I think that as long as just one company remains, there’s still profit to be made. For instance, I hear that there’s only one company in America still making steam locomotives, but they have backorders for 5 years. If you think about things from an international perspective, there’s still demand for steam locomotives out there. I think arcades are the same way.

Sega is one of the arcade’s old guard. We started with jukeboxes, but we really spread through the arcades. So I think that no matter what happens, we’ll keep operating in the arcade. No matter how bad people say the industry is getting, we’ll keep doing it. As long as we’re Sega, we’re not going to forget our roots.

(Interview held 1/11/2002)