As part of further research for my possible book Dreamcast Worlds (fund it here or it can’t happen), I recently interviewed Tom Szirtes about his time at Sega Europe. He was working in product R&D during the Dreamcast era, and paints an image of a tech playground where innovation was king and anything was possible. Here are some extracts:
“My job was initially to support developers who were writing games for Sega platforms, Sega Saturn and then later Dreamcast, but I was also developing all sorts of really odd bits. I worked on developing the network - you know, Dreamcast was connected to the network so you could find other games to play and compare high scores, and I wrote that bit. I did the Dream On demo disc, so I put all the game demos in one thing and packaged it onto Dreamcast Magazine. I worked on some games, mostly for the Saturn - I did some work on Sonic 3D - and then the last thing I did was I worked on a title called Planet Ring, which used voice over IP.
Planet Ring was a weird game.
Sega released a microphone peripheral for the Dreamcast, and there was I think only one game that it was used for - a talking fish, Bassman - it was a very strange game, you talked and interacted with this fish. Other than that I don't think there were any game, so when they launched this peripheral in Europe they thought, let's bundle a set of games to go with it.""I was actually the first person in Europe to ever use a Dreamcast.
When it first came in, there was me and my engineer, and they said alright, we've got a new console coming in, you can't show it to anyone else in the company. They just locked us in a room for about four months, and we just played around on the new Dreamcast, developing stuff.I think [the directions to develop products] must have come down from a director level. We had a marketing department but, to be honest, marketing at Sega in those days was very much more post-development marketing, the traditional idea of marketing as opposed to marketing these days tends to be very involved in product generation. Now when you talk about marketing you’re thinking about what kind of products should we build, but then I think it was much more developer-push. So some guy would have some technical idea and then you would push it that way as opposed to getting someone right at the beginning say ‘how can we sell this?’
So anyway, that [instruction to develop on the Dreamcast] came, and they brought across two Japanese staff from Sega Japan, there was a coder and an artist, and they said right, go and create something. So we sat and designed this thing.”
“It was a collection of mini-games, they all had to use the microphone in some interesting way.
How do you use a microphone in a game?
One was a maze game where one person has to navigate through a maze, but they can only see their immediate surrounding area, and then the other player can see the whole view of the maze, and they had to direct the one player to get to the end, avoiding the monsters and stuff like that. It's quite intense because the guy playing can't see the monsters and the other guy is going 'Oh no, quick turn left!'" [youtube [www.youtube.com/watch](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uIVHsWpSh6k])“There were four games, and they were hooked into [the network], and you had this little man, he’d walk around into each room.
It was the first version of multiplayer online social gaming;
you'd sit down and you'd see that other players were sitting down, this was all online, and you could see that you were all in the game together. It's stuff you take for granted now but back then there was no broadband, no Zynga, nothing like that so it was quite interesting for the time.""We used to call it the University of Sega
because you got to play with a lot of stuff and there wasn't really - well there was pressure at certain points, the time when I came under pressure were when I was working directly on development projects Sega was shipping - but most of the time, when I was doing technical support work, it was fairly self-organising, quite relaxed"“Sega Europe was small compared to Japan and America. So, the majority of R&D work went on in Japan, I know that America had one or two. Europe, we were the smallest of those territories. I can’t remember the exact size I think we were like six, maybe more people, ten people possible at its peak, so it’s not a large thing to organise. We weren’t making games, apart from the one I mentioned before, Planet Ring. So, we were mostly support functions and developing our own libraries, so it was quite interesting, we just ended up doing everything.
