BEN BROCK JOHNSON: Roman Mars from 99% Invisible.
ROMAN MARS: Ben Brock Johnson from Endless Thread.
BEN BROCK JOHNSON: Here we are–final boss of Hidden Levels. Are you ready, Roman? Do you have all your legendary items? Do you have full life? Did you save the game in case we lose against the final boss?
ROMAN MARS: That’s an important consideration. Yes, I am so excited for this because I think this might be the first final boss I’ve ever encountered. Like, I’ve never reached the part of the video game that you actually hit the final boss. So this is thrilling for me to be here at the very end.
BEN BROCK JOHNSON: Alright, well get ready to have a huge sense of accomplishment for beating a final boss that maybe means nothing to anyone except for you. That’s a very video game feeling. Let’s talk about something we’ve been touching on through this series but maybe never said explicitly. Video games are art. How does that sit with you, Roman?
ROMAN MARS: It sits very well with me. I think video games are absolutely art. They have beautiful visions. They bring worlds alive for people. They teach people how to think. They change your perspective. Video games are absolutely art.
BEN BROCK JOHNSON: Totally agree. And just like other kinds of art, video games are full of reference and homage. So, for instance, I think maybe you’ve heard of the game Metal Gear or Metal Gear Solid–that series of games.
ROMAN MARS: I’ve never played it, but I’m aware of Metal Gear.
BEN BROCK JOHNSON: So, Metal Gear was created nearly 40 years ago by game designer Hideo Kojima. Kojima is now one of the most loved and respected auteurs of video games in part because he has always put his own personality into the games that he makes. He’s got strong ideas. He’s committed to them, even when they’re basically referencing other pieces of art. The main character, Roman, in Metal Gear and Metal Gear Solid is named Solid Snake. He wears an eyepatch. He’s got a stubble beard on his Chad-like jaw. When you look at this game character, Roman, does he look familiar to you?
ROMAN MARS: So I’m looking at a picture of Solid Snake, and he is a dead ringer for Snake Plissken from the movie Escape from New York.
BEN BROCK JOHNSON: Nicely done. I think we’d have very few arguments on movie night, Roman.
ROMAN MARS: It’s a great movie.
BEN BROCK JOHNSON: It’s a great movie. Solid Snake was inspired by Snake Plissken, as you say, the character played by Kurt Russell in that 1981 sci-fi classic.
BOB HAUK: You gonna kill me now, Snake?
SNAKE PLISSKEN: I’m too tired. Maybe later…
ROMAN MARS: So, Kojima’s obviously a movie fan.
BEN BROCK JOHNSON: For sure. And Kojima actually has this new set of games that is also turning into their own franchise: Death Stranding and Death Stranding 2.
ROMAN MARS: Those are new to me. I’ve never heard of Death Stranding.
BEN BROCK JOHNSON: So, this game goes further than just references and homage. The game has been described as sort of a walking simulator because the main character is not a warrior. He’s not a sniper. He’s not a smash and bash ’em kind of guy. He is a courier, Roman. So, in the game, you are delivering packages. That’s the game.
ROMAN MARS: I love this. I love this. This does seem like my kind of game. I’m having a hard time imagining why a game about a courier is called Death Stranding. That doesn’t quite make sense to me.
BEN BROCK JOHNSON: Yeah. I mean, it does all take place in a post-apocalyptic environment.
ROMAN MARS: Got it.
BEN BROCK JOHNSON: You’re couriering babies in this game. So, stakes are high. Stakes are high for sure.
ROMAN MARS: Well, that makes sense. The stakes are high when you’re delivering babies in a post-apocalyptic environment.
BEN BROCK JOHNSON: Yeah, and–you know–we’re laughing about this, but the game is also a piece of commentary. You can see Kojima thinking through big questions, like the dangers of living in a society where we barely physically interact. And he’s doing it through this delivery guy–this courier–in Death Stranding. So Kojima is an example of how an artist’s personality–their point of view–can get coded right into the game itself. And today, Roman, we’re going to talk about another one of these examples–a game really coming from the inside of one man’s brain, his anxieties, his hopes, and his fears about the industry he works in and the company he works for.
This is where we’re going to start our final boss episode of Hidden Levels–with a Sega employee who had a front row seat to all of the chaos of working in the gaming business in the 1990s. And we’re gonna learn how he turned his experience into the most strangely iconic meta video game maybe of all time.
ROMAN MARS: 99PI producer Jayson De Leon brings it home for us.
JAYSON DE LEON: When I first met Tez Okano, I wasn’t sure what to expect. I had reached out to talk about a video game he created nearly 25 years ago–an obscure and fun Japanese title that had become a sort of fixation of mine. It’s a game that you can’t really begin to understand until you get to know the person who made it.
TEZ OKANO: So I’m a country bumpkin. I live in Tokyo currently and have lived in Tokyo for a while. But I am not a Tokyo person.
JAYSON DE LEON: Through an interpreter, Okano told me about his early life in rural southern Japan and how growing up in the 1970s, just as video games were taking off, set the stage for everything that was to come.
TEZ OKANO: I really have to insist on it. I am from the country. There’s, like, nothing–literally nothing. In terms of entertainment, what we had was the great outdoors. So anything with a hint of–you know–the city lingering on it, it was just something that we all longed for.
JAYSON DE LEON: As a kid, Okano dreamed of leaving the countryside. But often video games were his closest escape. He remembers playing versions of the classic tennis and brick-breaker titles of the ’70s, which were fun, but those games didn’t really move him. He says his love really started when one iconic title landed in his hometown.
TEZ OKANO: [IN ENGLISH] Space Invaders. Do you know Space Invaders?
JAYSON DE LEON: When Okano first played Space Invaders, he was struck by something he had never experienced in a game before. It had characters and stakes. It felt alive.
TEZ OKANO: [IN ENGLISH] Space Invader is creature. It’s invading.
JAYSON DE LEON: It’s a story.
TEZ OKANO: [IN ENGLISH] Yes. Story. World. Emotional! Emotional.
JAYSON DE LEON: Some people might only see an 11 by 5 grid of pixelated aliens when they play Space Invaders, but Okano saw a whole new world. And that passion led him away from the countryside and into a university where he studied game design. As a student, Okano created games on MSX, a type of home computer that helped shape the ’80s Japanese gaming scene.
TEZ OKANO: I love MSX. I just love, love, love MSX. It’s burned into my brain–making games like that.
JAYSON DE LEON: One of Okano’s MSX games was a silly 8-bit shoot-em-up called Saladman. The game was a spoof of a famous Japanese game called Salamander. MSX magazine wrote about Saladman and said it was funny and kind of crazy. And ultimately that playful oddball spirit helped Okano land the job straight out of college at Sega.
TEZ OKANO: And you can see. You can tell that I’m kind of a weird guy.
JAYSON DE LEON: Okano joined Sega in 1992. At the time, the company was riding high on the success of the Sega Genesis. It was the first console to challenge Nintendo’s grip over the home gaming industry. This kicked off what we know today as the Console Wars, a decades-long competition between companies for gaming supremacy. Early on, Sega and Nintendo competed over who had the better 2D graphics. But by the mid-90s, video games were heading in a new direction.
TEZ OKANO: Right after I started working there, everything was 3D. It was the era of 3D. You want to do pixel art or anything pixel–anything flat? No, it’s over. That time is over. You can’t sell pixels. You can’t sell that kind of stuff. 3D is what sells.
JAYSON DE LEON: When Okano created Saladman, he had to meticulously draw and color each individual graphic. On MSX, this meant following a strict set of rules on the number of pixels he could use and how to color them. But 3D required a very different skill set. So, when he arrived at Sega, Okano recalls that a bunch of pixel artists suddenly needed to adapt or they might find themselves out of work.
TEZ OKANO: And that really rubbed me the wrong way. It made me sad. You know, I got into games because I like pixel art. But by the time I got my start in this industry, the world of pixels was already on its way out.
JAYSON DE LEON: Okano feared that with the whole industry pushing towards 3D, pixel artists like him would become a thing of the past. He described it to me as watching the collapse of an empire. And his fears were warranted. Sega couldn’t be concerned with all that meticulously drawn, color each pixel, artsy fartsy stuff. They needed to innovate or risk falling behind their rivals. But in Sega’s push to bring new technology and 3D gaming into homes, the company just kept screwing up.
For example, are you a fan of Marky Mark and the Funky Bunch? No? Well, too bad. Here’s a game Sega put out on the Sega CD where you make Mark Wahlberg’s music video.
MAKE MY VIDEO: MARKY MARK AND THE FUNKY BUNCH: You want to make my video? Give me more shots of Marky with his shirt off…
JAYSON DE LEON: The Sega CD was an add-on to the Genesis that tried to cash in on the popularity of CDs at the time. But the device just didn’t have many games. And big surprise–the Marky Mark one wasn’t flying off the shelf. Sega followed this debacle up with yet another doomed piece of hardware called the 32X. It was a device that you literally stuck into the top of your Genesis to supercharge its processing power.
32X AD: Just stick it in your Genesis!
JAYSON DE LEON: The 32X was too little, too late. People were ready to move on from the Genesis. They were ready for a true 3D console. But the company’s next system, the Sega Saturn, totally missed the mark.
SIMON PARKIN: So the Sega Saturn is really a machine that’s very, very good at moving sprites–that’s the 2D bits of art–around a screen very, very quickly. It’s less good at handling 3D. And this is a miscalculation on Sega’s part because, by the mid-90s, everyone wants 3D games.
JAYSON DE LEON: This is Simon Parkin, a game journalist and host of the podcast My Perfect Console. Simon says–ha ha–that with each new piece of hardware, Sega further confused and alienated their audience. After all, the company hyped the Saturn as an era-defining 3D console. But when they couldn’t deliver the goods, a total newcomer to the industry stepped in and did.
SIMON PARKIN: Sony’s PlayStation is the first really capable 3D machine.
JAYSON DE LEON: The PlayStation was Sony’s first console. And it was a massive hit, selling tens of millions of consoles worldwide. Pair that with the release of the Nintendo 64–another console with 3D graphics–and suddenly Sega was in crisis. The high times of the Genesis were only a few years in the rearview, but it was fair to ask if Sega was going the way of Marky Mark and the Funky Bunch. Gone were the good vibrations, and so long went to sweet sensations. Sega needed to hit the reset button. And that’s exactly what they did with the Dreamcast.
SIMON PARKIN: The ads emphasize firstly an apology almost–like sorry for how far Sega has fallen–and also then switching it to be all about the return of Sega. And I think that was the name of the campaign in Japan, The Return of Sega.
JAYSON DE LEON: The Dreamcast was Sega’s response to the PlayStation and the company’s biggest punch in the console wars yet. It was the world’s first console with a built-in modem for online play. It also had a graphics card that blew the competition out of the water–not just 3D, but the best looking 3D by a long shot. With the Dreamcast, Sega was looking ahead to the new millennium and leaving its recent tumultuous past behind.
SIMON PARKIN: So, yeah, this is the gamble that Sega is making. “We’ll get out early, we’ll have the most powerful machine on the market, and we’ll also invest in our own designers here in Tokyo with the view of not only pushing the technological boundaries of what the Dreamcast can do, but also the kinds of games that are being made.” There was this atmosphere of experimentation and freedom, and you had the chance to try something new and see if it paid off.
JAYSON DE LEON: The late 1990s are known at Sega as the “Dreamcast years.” And during the Dreamcast years, Sega’s developers could, as one executive put it, “do whatever they wanted.” The mandate was to be original–to make games and create experiences that people had never seen before. Sega was throwing everything behind the Dreamcast to salvage their position in the console wars. And a lot of Sega’s developers took that to heart, including Tez Okano.
TEZ OKANO: Sega was the challenger, right? Sega was never the king. Sega was just coming up to the king and asking for a fight. So we had that kind of attitude–that underdog attitude at Sega.
JAYSON DE LEON: Okano told me that the first few titles he worked on at Sega were not a commercial success. There was a Dragon Ball Z game that just didn’t do great, a game where you ride in the back of a runaway rail car that was kind of a bust, and a dirt racing game.
TEZ OKANO: Which also did not do that great–was not a winner.
JAYSON DE LEON: When the Dreamcast years arrived, Okano was eager to try something new. But he was also aware of his not-so-stellar track record developing games. So any idea he had needed to work on a shoestring budget.
TEZ OKANO: And after my string of failures and I was just a total loser basically, no one’s going to come along and be like, “Oh here’s 700 million yen, make whatever game you want.” No, that wasn’t going to happen. No one was giving me any money.
JAYSON DE LEON: The Console Wars had left their mark both on Sega and on Okano. For years, developers like him worked long hours trying to make the company relevant again. They slept at their desk and showered at the office. OKano himself had to work extra hard to learn all the new techniques 3D games required. The stress was high, and the deadlines were relentless. And all of this gave Okano the idea for his next game. What if he could give people a peek behind the curtains? What if we made his next game a video game about making video games? No–more than that–a video about making video games during the Console Wars. Actually, no, no… What if you went full Monty and made a game about making video games during the Console Wars while working at Sega?
TEZ OKANO: Nothing I was making was really coming across too well until finally we get to Segagaga.
SIMON PARKIN: He sort of mangles the name of the game and makes it Segagaga or whatever. Se-gaga?
JAYSON DE LEON: It’s three G’s. Yeah.
SIMON PARKIN: Yeah, so that’s how he gets away with calling it that.
JAYSON DE LEON: Segagaga is part role-playing game, part management simulator–a game in which Tez Okano hands the controller to us, the players, and says, “Look, Sega is a mess. Do you think you can do any better?”
SIMON PARKIN: It’s really sort of an act of self-parodying documentary about Sega’s fortunes during the 1990s.
JAYSON DE LEON: Segagaga is a game that ticked all the boxes. Dreamcast had just launched, and Sega wanted developers across the company to create original games. And well, this was that. And yeah, he was one developer with a run of bad games under his belt. But Segagaga wouldn’t need a lot of resources. He would create the story, the characters, and all the ins and outs of the gameplay himself because, after all, he had lived through this whole experience. For Okano, it was just a matter of crafting his pitch to get Sega’s executives to say yes.
TEZ OKANO: I had my presentation set up, and it was really funny. It was really just hilarious–well-received. The whole room was busting a gut and just like, “Oh, you really got us! Oh!” And they thought it was a huge joke, so they didn’t give me any money.
JAYSON DE LEON: Okano actually had to go back another day and give the whole presentation again.
TEZ OKANO: And I was like, “No! I was serious the other day. I was being for real. This is not a joke.” And it was such a stupid, ridiculous kind of story that they just couldn’t believe that I was serious.
JAYSON DE LEON: There are a lot of reasons Sega would probably want to say no to Okano. But chief among them is that the game is acknowledging a pretty embarrassing fact about the company. It spent a lot of the ’90s missing the moment. And maybe it was just the ethos of the Dreamcast years. Or maybe it was Okano’s charm. Or maybe it was just the fact that the cost of the game was more or less a rounding error. But to Okano’s delight, Sega said yes.
JAYSON DE LEON: So, were you surprised when Sega gave you the green light?
TEZ OKANO: Yeah, no, I was desperate. I was back against the wall–at the end of my rope. But at the same time, I was really certain that I could make a good, fun, interesting game. And when they came back with the yes, I was just, like, over the moon.
JAYSON DE LEON: Segagaga is the kind of idea Okano would hear floated after work at a happy hour–something so zany and out there that people would laugh and joke about it and then, you know, just get up from the table and go back to doing whatever they were doing.
TEZ OKANO: But I did not walk away from it. I spent two years in that drunken state working on this game.
JAYSON DE LEON: In the opening title card to Segagaga, you, the player, are given the marching orders. “Sega is in bad shape. So it’s time to put the company’s top secret plan into action.”
EXXISTANCEDC: All right. Let’s go ahead and dive into the game.
JAYSON DE LEON: Yeah, let’s do it.
JAYSON DE LEON: This is ExxistanceDC, a gamer that’s working on an English translation of Segagaga. And he’s going to help me explain it because, honestly, there’s a lot going on in this game.
EXXISTANCEDC: You can always bounce around. But I’ll start, like, a brand new game here.
JAYSON DE LEON: In Segagaga, you play a bright-eyed and bushy-tailed developer–someone who hasn’t been run down by the Console Wars and the business of creating games. And your goal is to win back Sega’s market share from the Dogma Corporation.
EXXISTANCEDC: Dogma is supposed to represent, like, Sony.
JAYSON DE LEON: The PlayStation is what they’re trying to nod at here.
EXXISTANCEDC: Yeah, exactly.
JAYSON DE LEON: In order to make games that will eventually bury PlaySta– Ahem. Dogma… You, the hero developer, have to recruit a team to make hit games. The problem? Almost all of your potential teammates have turned into mutants who live in the dungeons below Sega headquarters.
EXXISTANCEDC: So we’re going to go into our first dungeon.
JAYSON DE LEON: Okay.
JAYSON DE LEON: It’s obvious that the stress and pressure of creating games has gotten to them. Some of these characters are over-caffeinated employees with bottles of energy drinks lying around them. Some have just been reduced to a gigantic blob of pixels.
EXXISTANCEDC: Other characters are Sega employees with their faces blurred, and it’s literally a photo of them where it’s like, “Let’s take a photo of you, blur out your face, and put you in the game.”
JAYSON DE LEON: The development dungeons are 3D environments, but you and the feral developers moping about are made up of 2D sprites. This gives the game an odd sort of look from the jump. It’s slapdashed with pixel art and other 2D elements that Okano has carefully pasted into the game. For example, one character you run into in this dungeon/lab has a big “3D” over his head. And he’s actively weeping.
EXXISTANCEDC: That’s basically supposed to be, like, a guy who does 3D modeling, so an artist on the project. And they’re being crushed under the weight of 3D.
JAYSON DE LEON: Like, just how difficult it is to render things in 3D?
EXXISTANCEDC: Yeah. Yeah.
JAYSON DE LEON: If this sounds absurd and insanely meta, that’s because it is. And for Okano, that was the whole point. He wanted the game to reflect what life in the development lab was really like. Take another example. One key part of the game are these battles where you, the hero developer, are trying to convince people to join your team. But there’s a catch. You want to convince them to join on the cheapest salary possible because, of course, the cheaper your team’s overall budget, the higher the profit margin.
In these battles, you try to weaken your opponent by basically launching insults at them. And instead of a typical life meter, these characters have a will meter. And it decreases as you unleash hell on them by saying their previous games suck or that they’ll never get a girlfriend. Here’s Tez Okano again.
TEZ OKANO: Actually, all of the attacks in the game, where there’s the fighting… Those are all lines–actual things that people in the office were saying that I just picked up and put in the games. These are actual quotes from my coworkers.
So, basically, it’s almost all true. Like, the whole game is basically just real life. The panic, the running around, the busy, the whole busy atmosphere of everything, and, you know, deadlines approaching–that’s all real.
JAYSON DE LEON: Depending on the team you’ve assembled, you can make big hit games which take longer to produce but win you back a bigger piece of market share. Or you can quickly make a bunch of trashy titles that barely keep the company afloat. And all of this is happening on a timer. You have deadlines to hit. And this, by the way, I think is the funniest part of the game. Right next to your deadline is an additional deadline titled More Realistic Deadline. But even these extended deadlines are hard to hit because occasionally you’re thwarted by a totally random event. Maybe one of your developers loses their mind and walks off your team. Or maybe someone downloads a bad attachment and suddenly your team is dealing with a computer virus.
EXXISTANCEDC: It kind of goes back to the larger kind of idea with Segagaga is that it’s not just kind of about Sega culture, it’s also about development and the challenges of getting a game to the finish line and the things that happen.
JAYSON DE LEON: Segagaga also has a whole story that unravels as you clear the different development stages. In these animated cutscenes, you watch Dogma–or PlayStation–attempt to sabotage Sega. And as if that isn’t enough, between each of these chapters is a, um… How do I describe this? A puppet show that Okano filmed with his coworkers?
[SEGAGAGA PUPPET SHOW]
TEZ OKANO: Oh yeah, that’s so– The puppet scenes are so funny, I love them. I love them so much.
JAYSON DE LEON: I know. I know. All of this sounds kind of bat [BLEEP]. But the game is also, like, pretty fun!
EXXISTANCEDC: I do think it’s a good game. I definitely think it holds up. I think the variety makes it great. Like, it’s almost better than I expected it to be. And it’s more modern than I expected it to be. And I enjoy the story more than I think I expected. So, yeah, I actually really love the game.
JAYSON DE LEON: To Okano’s credit, when he first showed Segagaga to Sega’s executives, he didn’t try to hide anything or make it something it wasn’t. He just showed them the game–this absurd, bizarre game.
TEZ OKANO: I guess, in a word, the reaction was: “What kind of idiocy are you doing here?” Basically, with Segagaga, I did everything that Sega hates. So the concept of the game was everything that Sega hates. It’s, like, not really well made. It’s cheap. It’s sort of sloppy. It’s weird. So it didn’t fit in any boxes at the company, which was the beauty of it.
JAYSON DE LEON: Look, Sega’s executives could have just killed this game right then and there. It didn’t cost much money to make, and it would have been pretty easy for them to just take the L. But that’s not what happened. Okano’s strange game actually made it to market under the Sega banner. And that’s partly because of a big development in the Console Wars.
Okano completed Segagaga in 2001. By that time, the Dreamcast had been out worldwide for almost two years. Here in America, the launch was the biggest ever for a console, bringing in nearly $100 million in 24 hours. Things were looking up… Well, at least for a second.
SIMON PARKIN: But the big problem is people know the PlayStation 2 is coming.
JAYSON DE LEON: Here’s game journalist Simon Parkin again.
SIMON PARKIN: And Sony is very, very effective in trailing the PlayStation 2 and saying, essentially, “Oh, look, Sega’s got this new system that’s coming out. But it’s really a stopgap. You know, if you pick this up, it’ll be dead in the water in two years because then the PlayStation 2 will be here.” And it runs on something called an Emotion Engine, which is a great piece of marketing. It’s got an Emotion Engine. You know, this is a console that’s going to be so powerful that it can make you cry. All of this nonsense–
JAYSON DE LEON: Is that a real thing they said?
SIMON PARKIN: Yeah, they did say that. But, you know, it was extraordinarily effective.
JAYSON DE LEON: With the PlayStation 2 on the horizon, sales of Sega’s Dreamcast basically flatlined. Sony’s marketing team convinced enough people that the system just wasn’t worth it–that the PlayStation had something even better in the works. And suddenly the story in Tez Okano’s game crept closer to reality. Dogma or PlayStation was squeezing Sega out of the console market. And then it actually happened.
SIMON PARKIN: Sega formally announces that it’s ceasing production of the Dreamcast and that the Dreamcast is going to be its last piece of hardware–that it’s exiting the console business. It continues to make games and publish games, which it still does to this day. But it’s no longer going to build any video game hardware.
JAYSON DE LEON: When Sega called it quits on consoles, it was a shock to the gaming industry. This was like Wonder getting out of the bread business–Reese’s saying, “Sorry everyone, we’re done making Pieces.” But in a strange twist, the big move actually benefited Segagaga. After all, Tez Okano had finished the game. It was already paid for. And it would be one of the last games released for a console that had already been discontinued. Instead of being laughed at, why not join the gag?
SIMON PARKIN: So the timing is extraordinary, completely prescient, and weird. Okano sort of has proven to be a little bit prophetic with all of that.
TEZ OKANO: Sega comes out and announces the end of Dreamcast, which is, like, all the free publicity you could ask for. I mean, the whole world was talking about Sega pulling out of the console business. So it’s on TV. It was in the newspapers. And of course, they’re talking about us because we’re a game and we’re the last game. So it was really great in that way.
JAYSON DE LEON: Still, with Sega moving out of the console business, it wasn’t about to support Segagaga that hard. The company gave Okano 30,000 yen, which is about $200 to promote his game. He and his publicist took that money and commissioned a friend to make a custom wrestling mask–one with big letters on top that read “SGGG”–Segagaga.
TEZ OKANO: So I just drew the design. That’s all I did. I drew a design. And then the idea was that I wear masks and go places.
JAYSON DE LEON: If you happen to be in the famous electronics district of Tokyo when the game launched, you might have seen Okano running from game store to game store in that mask, signing autographs for all of the Sega diehards who showed up. When Okano was making Segagaga, he wasn’t expecting Sega’s console business to collapse. But when it did, his game took on a whole new meaning. Now, it wasn’t just a self-parody of life at Sega during the console wars. The game acted as a sort of memorial for an era. As you move through the story of Segagaga, you meet characters from the company’s past, like Alex Kidd, Sega’s mascot before Sonic took the world by storm. There’s even an Easter egg for the real retro gaming heads out there: a 2D shoot-em-up made in that classic 1980s Sega style. Only the bosses in Okano’s game are all of Sega’s old failed consoles. The Sega CD–that’s in there. The 32X–huge boss! And it all culminates with the Sega Saturn, the daddy of them all. In a literal sense, you’re trying to defeat Sega’s history.
TEZ OKANO: So, Segagaga is, like, a practical joke of a game. You know, it’s poking fun at the things we made. It’s self-deprecating–warts and all. But, like, I love games, you know? I’m really proud of my work as a game creator.
SIMON PARKIN: The moral of the story is that, in the game’s ending, the character decides to keep making games even after he’s seen how challenging it could be. You know, it’s an industry that, for better or worse, thrives off the passion of the individuals who pour their creativity and energy into it. And I think that’s the ultimate message of the game.
JAYSON DE LEON: While Okano repeatedly and pointedly pokes fun at his employer, he also wants the people who made the games to know that he sees them. Creating is full of frustration. There’s never enough resources and there’s never enough time. You can do all the right things and sometimes the work just still falls short. But that’s okay because you made it. You and your team turned an idea into something that people can experience–maybe even enjoy. And in Okano’s world, that is a cause for celebration.
ROMAN MARS: Tez Okano is still making video games. His latest is an MSX-style shoot-em-up–or “shmup” as I’m learning right now as I read this–which was released in August. It’s called The Girl from Gunma Kai. And actually, the song you’re hearing right now is from that game.
BEN BROCK JOHNSON: You can find Okano’s new game and the rest of its soundtrack on Steam. He also recently released a pixel art movie called Final Re: Quest. Learn more about what he’s up to at his studio’s website, huga-studio.com. That’s huga-studio.com. When we come back from the break, we’re going to wrap up Hidden Levels.
[AD BREAK]
BEN BROCK JOHNSON: Roman Mars, I think we got past the final boss episode of Hidden Levels!
ROMAN MARS: We did. And what a doozy it was.
BEN BROCK JOHNSON: Yeah, that’s right. That Jayson De Leon guy. He’s a ringer, man. I heard he was actually once such a heavy video game player that he was globally ranked?
ROMAN MARS: Yeah, if I’m not mistaken, Jay was a ranked Halo 2 player.
BEN BROCK JOHNSON: That is amazing.
ROMAN MARS: And he used to, like, fight Jiu-Jitsu, too. He’s multi-talented.
BEN BROCK JOHNSON: Don’t mess with Jay in the digital or the real world. Fair. Well, Jayson’s story was a perfect, I think, final video game cinematic to our collaboration. Roman, at the end of our long quest to explore the hidden levels of how the video game world influences the real world, how are you feeling? What are you thinking about?
ROMAN MARS: I loved this collaboration. It was so much fun to explore video games in depth, and particularly because video games are this place in which every pixel, every decision, and every piece of design came out of someone’s brain. And it tells you so much about their values, what’s important to them, and what’s to the gamer. It’s just this great way to explore a lot of things that I like to think about all the time.
BEN BROCK JOHNSON: Absolutely. And I think we’re in a really interesting moment to look at video games in this way, right? Video games are going through some of the disruptive change that so many creative industries are going through–film, art, animation… AI, other technologies, conglomeration–these kind of larger tectonic shifts bring a lot of uncertainty to how we do and think about, I guess, telling stories. So it’s been wonderful to celebrate that. And what Jayson’s story, I think, typifies and what gives me some hope is that humans are endlessly, amazingly creative, whatever the larger trends in the industry bring.
ROMAN MARS: Yeah, and I think it’s important to note that so much of our premise was that video games influence the real world, but video games in and of themselves are just worthy of study. They are fascinating. They tell you so much about what life is like and what life means to people. It’s just a rich text. So this is where our couch co-op of Hidden Levels ends for now. I think my mom got us some chicken nugs that we can heat up in the microwave. I brought the Mountain Dew. This is where gamers and I see eye to eye about just the virtues of Mountain Dew, the greatest drink that was ever invented.
BEN BROCK JOHNSON: [LAUGHING] Do the dew. Do the dew!
ROMAN MARS: I do the Dew way too much for a 50-year-old man. But regardless, this is not the end of hearing from us at 99% Invisible and Endless Thread. We have new stories coming to listeners every single week. Make sure you follow both of our shows–subscribe to both shows–because we’re both people who like to describe and interact with and engage with the world and explain it in cool ways with people that you’ll like to hang out with. So you can get Endless Thread and 99% Invisible wherever you get your podcasts.
BEN BROCK JOHNSON: Like chicken nuggets and Mountain Dew, man.
ROMAN MARS: Perfect together.
BEN BROCK JOHNSON: Reminder to folks as well that, if you wanna keep playing along, we have two–count ’em–two side quests in the Endless Thread feed if you haven’t listened to those yet. And now, like any good AAA video game or podcast…
ROMAN MARS: Roll credits.
This episode was produced by Jayson De Leon. Edited by Meg Cramer. Mix by Martín Gonzalez. Fact-checking by Graham Hacia. Original music by Swan Real and Paul Vaitkus.
Extra special thanks this week to Jocelyne Allen who helped translate and interpret our interview with Tez Okano. Truly the best.
Also a special thanks to Lewis Cox and Tom Charnock over at The Dreamcast Junkyard. Their insight on SEGA, the Dreamcast, and Segagaga was extremely helpful in making this story.
Simon Parkin has a book about the history of the Dreamcast called Sega Dreamcast: Collected Works. It’s rich and beautiful and has even more details about Segagaga that we could not fit into this story.
BEN BROCK JOHNSON: Additional thanks to Adam Kuplowsky and 17 Bit’s Jake Kazdal.
Tez Okano would like to thank the small team that supported Segagaga. Especially Hisao Oguchi, Tadashi Takezaki, and Taku Sasahara.
The Managing Producer for Hidden Levels is Chris Berube.
Endless Thread is a production of WBUR, Boston’s NPR. Our team tackling unsolved mysteries, untold histories and other wild stories from the internet includes my illustrious cohost Amory Sivertson, Managing Producer Samata Joshi, Producers Grace Tatter, Frannie Monahan, Sound Designer Emily Jankowski, and our Production Manager Paul Vaitkus.
Thanks by the way to Ian Bogost, one of the great video game thinkers and writers of our time. His work you can find at The Atlantic and in many books. You should check it out.
And Marijam Did, a gamer, developer and author who has a great book on a similar subject to our series! It’s called How Videogames are Changing the World. It’s full of Amazing stories, you should totally read it.
ROMAN MARS: And for 99% Invisible, Kathy Tu is our executive producer. Kurt Kohlstedt is the digital director. Delaney Hall is our senior editor. The rest of the team includes Emmett Fitzgerald, Christopher Johnson, Vivian Le, Lasha Madan, Jeyca Medina-Gleason, Kelly Prime, Joe Rosenberg, and me, Roman Mars. The 99% Invisible logo was created by Stefan Lawrence. The art for this series was created by Aaron Nestor.
We are part of the Stitcher and SiriusXM Podcast Family, now headquartered six blocks north in the Pandora building… in beautiful… uptown… Oakland, California.
By the way, where is WBUR? Like, what neighborhood is that?
BEN BROCK JOHNSON: Roman Mars, it is in beautiful… lovely… rainy… Boston… or Brookline, depending on who you’re asking. You can come visit any time.
ROMAN MARS: Ben, thank you so much.
BEN BROCK JOHNSON: Roman, thank you. I’ll see you in that video game lobby.
ROMAN MARS: And thanks everyone for listening.
Leave a Comment
Share