SEGA Mega Drive/Genesis: Collected Works Kickstarter

[TrekMD]

An updated has been posted today on this project...

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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.

[TrekMD]

Here is an update that was released today:

I'm pleased to report that we are close to handing over the completed, fully-designed book to SEGA for final checks. All being well, each one of the 340 lovingly-designed pages – packed full of artwork, interviews and design documents – will land of the desks of SEGA's finest at some point next week. If our progress was to take the form of a SEGA game, you could say we're entering Death Adder's castle, or purposefully striding through the corridors of Mr. X's exquisitely-carpeted gangster lair.

Following SEGA's approval of the page designs, we'll then be putting the book into production at one of Europe's finest art book printers. We've agonised over paper stocks, covering materials and other little production touches for several weeks now; the aim being that upon flipping through your freshly-unwrapped copy, time will slow down a little bit and even the most hardened of SEGA fans amongst you will get a bit quivery-lipped. Probably an over-ambitious goal but hey, we've got a specially-commissioned photograph of the Neptune prototype in there don't y'know...

As soon as everything is rubber-stamped and signed off, I'll be able to run the address survey and give you all a firm idea on shipping dates. I'm looking forward to sharing some images of the completed book with you as soon as I'm able. Meanwhile, do follow us on Twitter if you'd like regular updates on all things Read-Only Memory, or – should you prefer your news intermittent but substantial – why not sign up for the ROM newsletter over at our site?

While you're waiting, I'd like to share a small snippet from Keith Stuart's brilliant written history of the Mega Drive/Genesis, entitled 'Arcade Perfect'. This particular excerpt offers insight into the creative process behind North America's iconic 'Sega Scream' TV ads – many of which you'll be able to pore over when your book arrives...

Late in 1991, [Tom] Kalinske invited pitches for the company's multimillion-dollar advertising account. One firm, Goodby, Berlin & Silverstein, took the challenge extremely seriously. Irina Lapin, the associate planning director, went out on the road with a videographer to record the views of children and teenagers. 'We'd find kids who were opinion leaders in their groups, who set the tone,' she says. 'We'd go into their homes, we'd find out what kind of posters they had on their walls, the music they were listening to, what they watched on television – anything they were interested in. We'd sit on the floor with them and have them show us how they played games, how they felt while they were playing. It was a great deal of fun.'

What she discovered was that they all had Nintendo Entertainment Systems – but they all lusted after the Genesis. 'The perception among the kids was that the Genesis had better graphics, better games ... but it was hard to convince their parents to go out and spend $150 on a new game system. We knew we had to build on that preference for Sega. You can't underestimate pester power.'

The agency got the job, and in 1992 pumped out 35 TV ads in four months, catering to the MTV attention spans of '90s teens. The theory was that no one needed detailed information about the games any more, just a few seconds of video footage flashed on the screen with some pounding rock music and explosions – it was all about image and rebellion. 'We wanted to convey the irreverence and the haphazardness that kids really enjoy,' says Lapin. 'Kids like nothing better than randomness and non sequiturs.' Brilliantly, each TV spot ended with actors shouting 'Sega' at the screen, with crazed abandon. 'We heard it from some of the kids we interviewed while they were horsing about,' says Lapin. 'You can't have four or five 11-year-olds sitting still in a room, it just doesn't happen. So they started messing about, pushing each other, shouting "Sega, Sega". In the excitement of the moment they'd just start randomly shouting it – so we picked up on that.' It soon became a schoolyard meme – a dream scenario. The company had become part of sound-bite culture.

[zapiy]

Really looking forward to this book.

[TrekMD]

So am I.  I can hardly wait, particularly now that I have a Genesis! 

[Shadowrunner]

Update!

Last Friday, a courier collected a hefty 11kg package of digital proofs to begin their safe passage to Italy, where they will shortly be used to perfectly balance the colours and tone of every page in Collected Works. In short, our work is over!

Since my last update, colours have been obsessed over, blemishes removed, blacks optimised and a weird dream about Chuck D. Head from DecapAttack has been had. We ran a little late on handing over the files as we decided to rework all the game images in the book (about 600 images) to ensure a crisper look on the page – our repro house developed a method of processing these images that means the pixels will look sharp enough to cut your finger on. We hope you'll appreciate that extra few days' work when you delve into the game art showcase.


So, enough technical waffle. Our printer is now readying our files for the press, and has provided that all-important production schedule. Herewith the details you've been so patiently waiting for:

Printing begins next Tuesday 23 September
Binding, finishing and wrapping begins from 29 September
Books leave Italy for the UK on 17 October
Worldwide shipping begins from our UK warehouse on Friday 24 October

So that's five weeks to go until copies of Collected Works start making their way around the world! It's later than I'd hoped, this being entirely down to our admittedly obsessive behaviour when it came to getting all the images as we wanted them. We've erred on the side of quality with every production decision so I must thank you for indulging our way of working and being patient with us during the past few months. I'm confident you'll treasure your investment!

Not long now 

[TrekMD]

Awesome!

[zapiy]

That's awesome news. Always good to hear when a project nears it's end.

[AmigaJay]

Yeah, out of all the books I've bought recently this is one I'm looking forward to the most!

[JoeMusashi]

Another update email today asking to confirm delivery addresses.
The books appear to be shipping out this Friday!

 

[zapiy]

Great news. 

[AmigaJay]

Yeah betcha! Really looking forward getting this early next week hopefully.

[TrekMD]

Looking forward to getting mine!

[Greyfox]

If they had done a Snes one, I'd of grabbed it off the hook, why are all these great books like this only covering one type of machine..

I'm sure this is gonna be kick ass.

[JoeMusashi]

Got home from work last night and my copy was waiting for me.
It does look very pretty after a quick look. I need to set some time aside to have a good look through it.

Sweet!

[zapiy]

Take some pics if you can pal. Also you could so a review?