Yoji Ishii Interview

[Berto]

In case, you haven't read this before, it's an interesting interview with Yoji Ishii , especially if you love the original Fantasy Zone.



Link : http://shmuplations.com/fantasyzone/

Some interesting quote here :

Ishii: This part here (points to the explanation for the different engines at arcade instruction card) made Sega angry. The Rocket Engine makes your ship impossibly  fast, and it was a kind of joke, but we didn’t say that on the instructions. We didn’t realize that until after everything was printed and released, and man, Sega was furious. There were a lot of very serious people at Sega then.

A : Sega in the late 80s seemed to follow that philosophy: they weren’t just making what players were asking for. Instead they were leading players, and after playing a Sega game you felt like “oh, I had wanted to play something like this!” It was impressive. 

Ishii: That positive culture at Sega in the 80s is owed to then-President Hayao Nakayama. He constantly told us, “Be the first: make something the world has never seen before.” The whole staff tried to follow that philosophy.

[Centrale]

"Be the first: make something the world has never seen before." Does any major publisher have that kind of vision these days? Now it's more like "Make a slight variation of what we are sure will sell."

[Berto]

"Be the first: make something the world has never seen before." Does any major publisher have that kind of vision these days? Now it's more like "Make a slight variation of what we are sure will sell."

Or like, "Here's the budget. Make sure it's not over from that and get profit as much as we can"