Yes, those "idiot" gamers. How dare they stick up for Level-5 when the game was completed BEFORE the patent was given.
Game Completion: 2008
Patent: 2009
Level 5 has said they plan to fight back - it takes AGES to LOSE this bad.
I'm not sure Joe is arguing that they're idiots for defending Level 5, per se (and I have been known to misread him before), but rather, that the industry is, in general, full of ungrateful idiots who get a good laugh at Sega's products and innovations - which then become industry standard half a decade later. I think he makes a legitimate point.
There is one really fantastic interview Yu gave back in the mid 90s, describing the dual processing design of the Saturn. He argued that only about one in one hundred programmers would be able to maximize the potential of Saturn's engines; that the Saturn is a much more capable machine than a Playstation in the right hands, but that most "junk" programmers would rather just use the Playstation programming libraries and be done with it.
This, to me, illustrates a very serious problem that existed in the industry in the 90s, and one that has only become worse in the last decade. Yu's junk programmers are becoming more common. There no longer seems to be any real innovation in the market. Many of the most amazing games and ideas have come from Sega, or people talented enough to work Sega's hardware. Generally speaking, these efforts were rarely appreciated in their original incarnation. The latest incarnation in a game series the Smithsonian deems culturally significant, Virtua Fighter 5, has sold around one million copies, worldwide, in five years. It's competitor, if you could call it that, Tekken 6, sold three millions in five months.
The same was true of hardware. The Wii Mote is something Sega was teasing us with in the 90s; a new Dreamcast controller for Air NiGHTS. The Wii U is just a VMU with a decade of technology thrown on. Kinect is, of course, just a new Activator. I can enjoy 3D TV games on my MasterSystem. I can download games onto an XBOX, much like I could with a MegaDrive and a cable subscription. I would almost hazard to say that we haven't seen much innovation at all in terms of hardware since Sega left the market; simply better ways of giving us things more cheaply than Sega was giving us decades ago.
Sega is often ripped off by these lazy designers and junk programmers. Sega spent millions of dollars researching and developing ideas like the VMU or the Air NiGHT controller, or online platform gaming (and which directions that would take) or cell shading, or sandbox games, or voice recognition, or the watercolor look of Valkyrie of the Battlefield, or Shenmue's FREE system, or any other damn thing. They have every right to get indignant when companies like EA take an entire game and just slap a coat of Simpson's paint on it - and then that game sells as well, or better, than Sega's original product.
I have no idea if Level 5 is in the wrong. I don't think that was the point Joe was making, though I could be mistaken. I simply think its frustrating for an entire industry to laugh at your wild schemes, wait five years and have Sony or Nintendo or EA do the same thing and be called brilliant, and then be spat upon and called washed up. I think those are the sort of people - the lazy designers, the junk programmers, and the consumers who support them - that Joe called idiotic.
