Part Two of our translation of a new interview with Yu Suzuki that was published in the recently-released SEGA Hard Historia book, featuring retrospectives with various key developers and staff members over the years.
Part One can be found here if you haven't yet read it:
In the second and final part of the interview, Yu-san talks about the evolution of 3D in games, and the Sega Saturn and Dreamcast eras.
Source material supplied by SkillJim (James Brown). Check out his SEGA Hard Historia unboxing video at the end of the article!
The interview translation continues below, with Yu describing how he gathered video footage for Out Run during his trip in Europe.
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YS: We took videos with a camera to the hood and near the wheel suspension, attached with duct tape or string. It also had a sunroof, so I opened the sunroof and filmed from there. When I was thinking over what the player's car should be, I saw a red Ferrari outside a public casino in Monaco. A Testarossa. And it was a convertible. "That's it!", I thought, "There's no car more exciting, no car with more presence, no other car more enviable!" And the sunshine, unlike in Japan, was so crisp and clear. With its vivid red color shining brightly, under a blue sky and white clouds - I knew this was it.
Q: You next went on to create After Burner and G-LOC. What motivated you to create those?
YS: Well, there wasn't anything connecting on to these games. Mr. Hayao Nakayama, who was the (Sega) president at the time, was talking a lot about how MicroProse had released a flight simulator that had become a hit in the US. He was always saying, "Don't we have a flight simulator?" So I thought, "Why don't we make a flying game?"
It was like when I was working on Out Run and Hang On. Namco had games like Pole Position, and there was a general perception that racing games were Namco's thing. So when Mr. Nakayama said, "Don't we have a racing game?" I thought, "I should make one." (laughs) When I started Hong On, I had thought of making a racing game, but cars running into one other didn't seem very appropriate, so I decided to go with Hang On. So that's why there was this sense that Namco was the only company that made racing games. If I was going to make a game, I wanted to make one with something like the F14. Also, part of it was because Space Harrier gave me the chance to try something I hadn't done before. At the time, there was no 3D hardware, you see.
So I rendered 3D airplanes with a 3D library I had built, and made use of the resulting set of images, switching between them. I input all the data for the plane by hand, using 3D software tools I wrote myself. As they were sprites, I was free to hand-draw them how I wanted, but if I made the missiles look too smooth, they wouldn't look 3D. I wanted them to have a polygonal appearance, so I purposely made them hexagonal.
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| After Burner: Suzuki deliberately gave the missiles a hexagonal look |
