Hideki Sato - Japanese vs American Game Developers | Jordan H.J.

This is a small moment in gaming history in which Hideki Sato of SEGA shared some knowledge. I found a gem that I wanted to share with everyone. Thanks to Johan Oberg for translating. I'm Jordan H J and I make videos about gaming history.

Check out my other channels @JordansAnimeChannel @cinewhirl

Support the channel, and me as a creator!
  / jordanhj  

Full Transcript of Quote -
Because the Genesis did very well in America, Sega of America wanted to make some games of their own. They got some people together, maybe a couple hundred, and started developing games. Plenty of stinkers, but they made them. Titles kept coming out, although most of them never made much of a splash. In contrast to Nintendo and later Sony, it made it look like Sega would greenlight anything. But I think they were also glad that they were producing their own games. EA made mostly sports games, and they were really good at it, like NFL or NBA games. Those kind of sports like the Major League were very popular in the US and Sega wouldn't have been able to make as good of a job on that themselves. EA had a strong hold on the sports section with their licensing contracts with the NBA and NFL etc.

Japanese third-party companies, especially Taito Namco or Konami, I'm not sure if I mentioned this before but they really didn't like Nakayama, and if what they made were to benefit Nakayama, they didn't want to be a part of it, therefore a lot of Japanese third-party companies didn't make games for us. Up to the 16-bit generation was the cartridge era. During this time Japanese game development was really strong. As for why, it's because Japan is Japan. And this is just my own theory but 130 million of us Japanese share this cramped space, 13 million being in Tokyo. Trains run full to the brim of people. And the people live together in peace and quiet. America on the other hand, which is many times bigger than Japan, maybe 10 times bigger and their population is around 240 million. What does this have to do with games? Well games in the 16-bit generation were made onto computer chips, right. In these chips or ROMs, all the games story, graphics, music and everything else had to be crammed into them. We had to work really hard to make the very most of the space we had available, to get as much information in their as we possibly could. It's kind of like our houses here in Japan, our apartments, apartment complexes. Our full trains. In those small spaces, to get as much in as possible while still working together, that's Japan's speciality. Q: If the sound isn't within a certain amount of kilobits, it can't be put in, that kind of thing. Satou: If it's not under a certain amount it can't be put in. But nowadays Japanese game development is suffering, although there are standouts. But when the CD-ROM era came around, the 4 megabit or even specially-made 16 megabit were no more. Now we had 540 megabyte to use. My example would be, say I had 30 tsubo (Japanese area measurement, approximately 3.3 square meters) or 50. I could build a nice house, even add a veranda to it. I can imagine what I would do with that area. But I have 5000. I can do whatever I want with it. Or hey, why not 10000. So, what to do with all that space? I can't imagine! That's far removed from the Japanese lifestyle. Here's where I think the American viewpoint started to become more effective. Within the 16-bit generation we went from the MC68000 to RISC CPU. The calculation power got substantially better, we had more memory to work with and the speed was up, which was good. But that way the Japanese skill of meticulously working details and working a lot of data into a small space, there was progressively less need for that.

#RetroGaming #SEGA #GamingHistory