Naka-san on Hisashi Suzuki-san's interview

News from 2019.03.16
Archived on 2019.03.19

Upon reading an article of a series called "Tale-tellers of Video Games" by Fumio Kurokawa (former SEGA employee), Naka-san talks about his memory with Hisashi Suzuki-san back in the time in SEGA.

Visit the original article first!
https://www.4gamer.net/games/999/G999905/20190302005/




Brief information translated from the article:



Hisashi Suzuki used to be an executive director at SEGA-AM2 and president of CRI, and supported developement of middle wear for enhancing sound and visuals of games, leading to birth of many popular arcade games such as "Virtua Racing", "Virtua Fighter" and further Virtua series among others. + He was also the project manager in classic Sonic games.
He was also a good friend with Michael Jackson, and their friendship was probably the key to development of the game "Michael Jackson's Moonwalker".

He was known for having a long talk with his co-workers, and one such person, Satoshi Mifune-san (developer of Virtua Striker etc.) recall talking about it with Yu Suzuki-san (developer of Virtua series, Shenmue series etc.) as "One 'Suzuki unit' is 1.5 hours", since one could not get back to work once called over to Suzuki-san. They remember their talk being full of variety in topics, not just about games.

Below are Naka-san's tweets and their translations by me.

鈴木久司さんの所に呼ばれると確かに長いお話でしたね。でもいつも元気をもらって帰ってくる感じでしたので、僕は楽しみでした。鈴木さんにコンシューマー担当の僕がサンバDEアミーゴの企画を持って行ったら作っていいよと言って頂き初めてアーケード作品を作れたのです。 https://t.co/drRFEYOhUv

— Yuji Naka / 中　裕司 (@nakayuji) March 16, 2019

"When I had gotten called over to Hisashi Suzuki-san, we sure had a long talk. But I always receive energy from him as I went back to work, I had always been looking forward for such opportunity. I was able to make an arcade game for the first time because of him - I, who was in charge for consumer games, brought my project for Samba DE Amigo to him, and he gave me a go sign for it."

鈴木久司さんにはマイケルジャクソンに紹介して頂いたり一緒にゲームをさせて頂いたりととても嬉しかったです。この記事にもありますが、サンフランシスコでソニックを作っていた僕たちにバーチャファイターのプロトタイプのビデオを嬉しそうに見せて頂き当時かなりビックリしました。

— Yuji Naka / 中　裕司 (@nakayuji) March 16, 2019

"One time he introduced me to Michael Jackson, other times I played games with him - it was a pleasure to work with Hisashi Suzuki-san. As written in this article too, I remember being very surprised when he happily showed us his video on prototype of Virtua Fighter when we were developing Sonic in San Francisco."

According to the article, Sakai-san from Capcom, the leading game company of the time with its release of Streat Fighter series, told Suzuki-san that they 'lost' when he saw the demo of Virtua Fighter.

Hisashi Suzuki-san, a charismatic manager, is now in his retirement and is enjoying his free time. He says that SEGA nowadays lack of challenging spirit, despite their slogan "Creaetion is Life".

"Nowadays they carefully balance between budget and profit, lacking aggressiveness."
"I used to have fight with my boss trying to move the due date for finishing the game, trying to make my game better for customers. It used to be developers themselves who decides the end of the development. ...well, not meeting the due date is not good, but if you stick to that, you can do anything."

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