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The ultimate retrospective of the SEGA Mega Drive/Genesis. A documentary art book by Read-Only Memory.

SEGA Mega Drive/Genesis: Collected Works

The ultimate retrospective of the SEGA Mega Drive/Genesis. A documentary art book by Read-Only Memory.
The ultimate retrospective of the SEGA Mega Drive/Genesis. A documentary art book by Read-Only Memory.
Created by

Darren Wall
Darren Wall

2,242 backers pledged £98,725 to help bring this project to life.
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SEGA Mega Drive/Genesis: Collected Works

by Darren Wall

Update #10

Progress Report and Yu Suzuki Excerpt

11 Comments
11 Comments
35 likes

Things have been coming together nicely over the past few weeks, with all of the book's content nearing completion. Join me, if you will, for a neatly bullet-pointed list of our progress…

Progress

  • Keith Stuart’s 16,000 word tour of Mega Drive/Genesis history – entitled ‘Arcade Perfect’ and featuring countless Se-ga-lebrities imparting previously untold stories – is now finished and with SEGA for review.
  • Every one of our 27 developer interviews – from Tombo Arikawa to Toru Yoshida – has been copy-edited and approved, totalling a whopping 45,000 words.
  • Our hardware photography gallery – a sumptuous tour of items such as the Nomad, Wondermega and Mega Jet – is all done and dusted.
  • The last few pages of the Bare Knuckle/Streets of Rage document are being translated and recreated by hand as I write.
  • Just about all of the images we’ve sourced have been given the go-ahead by SEGA and are being carefully placed throughout our 352 velvety-white pages.

Book Upgrade/Schedule

After finalising the content, I also decided upon another upgrade to the book itself - enlarging the page dimensions from 190mm x 240mm to an extremely ‘coffee-table-friendly’ 216 x 267mm. This upgrade allows me to comfortably include more text, imagery, and specifically, reproduce some of the design documentation at an easily-legible scale.

We should receive Keith’s essay back from The Big S in a few weeks. Following that, the completed book will be sent across for final approval and I’ll be in touch with you all to gather your names for our Benefactor section. I’ll be certain to let you know should we get delayed at all with the review process, but as it stands, we’re on target to deliver as planned, marking the summer season with a hefty arrival at your door. Not the most practical item to take with you to the beach perhaps, but a good way to spend a few nostalgic evenings nonetheless.

Yu Suzuki Interview Preview

Finishing up, I’d like to share with you a snippet from Yu Suzuki’s interview. Suzuki-san has been in the news recently, talking at the Game Developers Conference about the development of Shenmue. With this fresh in everyone’s mind, I thought I’d tease a little bit of what he reveals in Collected Works…

What drew you to games, and specifically, to Sega? I was interested in music, art and programming so I thought a video game company would be a good place to combine those pursuits. Another important reason was that they offered a five-day working week. [Laughs]

Can you describe what it was like working for Sega in the early 1980s? What was your first project? When I joined Sega in 1983, there were about 50 people working in both the hardware and software development departments. It was a transitional time as the company was moving away from selling games made by third parties and starting to develop its own titles. My first project was a game called Champion Boxing for the SG-1000. It was my first time as a project leader, so I learned a lot about working in a team and managing people, as well as programming, sound and graphics.

What were the initial ideas behind Space Harrier? The original proposal was to create an air-to-surface combat simulation game that felt as realistic as possible, involving a vertical take-off and landing fighter plane such as the Harrier Jump Jet. The hardware at the time had only a small amount of memory capacity, and we required 64 frames of animation to rotate the fighter jet smoothly. We weren’t able to achieve this effect given the hardware constraints, but we realised that if we used a human player sprite we could make it look like they were flying with only a few frames of animation. As we developed the look and feel of the game, I drew influence from the painter Roger Dean and the fantasy world depicted in the film The NeverEnding Story.

The extravagant and pioneering OutRun marked a further evolution in both hardware and software design. What were the origins of the game? I liked the film The Cannonball Run, and I wanted to make a game based on it. Mainstream driving games at that time were designed simply to improve your driving skills, so I wanted to buck against that and create a game where you drive a car with one hand on the steering wheel and a beautiful woman in the passenger seat… and you win the race by a huge margin with no real challenge posed by any of the other drivers. With this mind, it also seemed appropriate that you could listen to songs on your radio as you drove, just as in a real car.

Your career with simulations has been incredibly diverse, but do you have a single, unifying approach to game design? It varies from project to project, but there are some common aspects. For instance, when developing an idea for a simulator game, I thoroughly research the subject in question and try to gain first-hand experience until I understand its most compelling aspects. Once I have an understanding of what makes an activity enjoyable in the real world, I can then consider how to go about making the game.

Links

That’s all for now! I’ll have news of our progress with approvals very soon. In the meantime, please do follow us on Twitter to remain up to date with news of the Collected Works book and feel free to drop me a line at darren@readonlymemory.vg if you’d like to chat about what’s going to be included in the book.

Finally, last week I had the pleasure of joining the crew at the SEGAbits site for an interview and appearance on their podcast. You can read the full interview – covering the production of the book and my SEGA fanboyism here, while the podcast – a special episode dedicated to (yes!) Bare Knuckle/Streets of Rage awaits you here.

Dennis Beebe, Barry the Nomad, and 33 more people like this update.

Comments

    1. Creator Simon Hildreth on May 2, 2014

      I'd like to congratulate you on yet another well executed KS.

    2. Creator Agness Kaku on March 28, 2014

      @Darren, done and done. It's my leaving-the-game-industry-gift to myself :)

    3. Creator Darren Wall on March 26, 2014

      Agness: Thanks for the kind words. You certainly can upgrade – pre-orders are open now over at our site: http://readonlymemory.vg/sega-mega-drive-genesis-collected-works

    4. Creator Darren Wall on March 26, 2014

      Phillip: We will indeed, but we'll probably do that at the last possible moment so we get everyone's most up-to-date information. So no need to worry – we don't currently hold any address information.

    5. Creator Lorenzo Maini on March 26, 2014

      Fantastic update. Thank you Darren, it's rare to find Kickstarter projects with such professional management and great updates for the backers.

    6. Creator Phillip Haydon on March 26, 2014

      Will you confirm Addresses before delivery? Moving apartment soon...

    7. Creator Bryan Dickson on March 26, 2014

      Excellent update Darren!! Keep the good news coming! :-)

    8. Creator Agness Kaku on March 26, 2014

      This looks to be less just-plain-cool and more seminal. I don't suppose it's possible to upgrade my donation to THE BOOK tier at this point…?

    9. Creator Brad Porter on March 26, 2014

      Great stuff. Looking forward to it being completed, not long now!

    10. Creator bastien larriaga on March 26, 2014

      Fantastic News ! Even the short Yu Suzuki snippet was full of interesting new info. Can't wait for the whole thing to come out !

    11. Creator Barry the Nomad on March 26, 2014

      Thanks for the update, Darren! SEGAbits is honored to share an update with Yu Suzuki!

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