Showing posts with label Hidekazu Yukawa. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Hidekazu Yukawa. Show all posts

Celebrating 25 Years of the Dreamcast and the Kaiju Monster it Rode in on

Well, shit. It’s been 25 years…or 300 months…or over 13 million minutes. That’s how long it’s been since Godzilla Generations was unleashed in Japan.

And the Dreamcast, too, for that matter.

In our house, it's always November 27th, 1998.

I was a tween when I first learned of Sega’s swansong console. Undeterred by President Shoichiro Irimajiri’s creepy disembodied head at the initial Dreamcast reveal, it was ultimately Sonic Adventure which ignited my hype for the platform and all the ambitious and imaginative experiences that would come to define it.

(From EGM #112 November 1998)
Don’t tell tween me that middle-aged me kept this tattered mag. He’d think it was weird and sad and he’d probably be right.

But the blue ‘hog was just the tip of the spear. With unprecedented visual and aural fidelity, groundbreaking online capabilities, intuitive hardware architecture, and a supplemental operating system, the Dreamcast fancied itself as both a developer-friendly haven and bleeding-edge forerunner of gaming’s future.

(Preserved by Unseen64.net)

Elsewhere on the software front, Virtua Fighter 3tb, Get Bass/Sega Bass Fishing, and Sega Rally 2 signaled a renewed commitment to Sega’s iconic arcade experiences at home. Blue Stinger, Pen Pen TriIcelon, and Climax Landers (eventually released as Time Stalkers in the West) flaunted their vibrancy and helped crystallize the Dreamcast’s aesthetic. AM2’s Shenmue – known as 'Project Berkley' at the time – promised to help reimagine how players might inhabit dense and bustling virtual spaces. Meanwhile, the presence of Biohazard: Code Veronica and D2 hinted at resurgent third party support from large and small game makers alike. And Godzilla Generations…was also there.

Although most of Sega’s in-house projects had yet to be unveiled in depth, they’d go on to spark a creative and innovative renaissance that continues to endear the Dreamcast to us a full 2.5 percent of a millennium later.

(From EGM's 1999 Video Game Buyer's Guide)
Some of the other games I was looking forward to.

In the meantime, Sega faced hurricane-force headwinds as it prepared to get the thing off the ground. The community has expressed no shortage of anecdotes for all the challenges stacked against the company at the time. Among them, people often blame the following:

  • Sega’s dwindling financial resources (i.e. capitalism*);
  • A merciless competitive landscape amid Sega’s diminished command of industry trends (also capitalism*);
  • The upcoming launch of the PlayStation 2 (capitalism strikes again!*);
  • Intracompany divisions over the direction and priorities for the Dreamcast across regions;
  • Sega's squandered goodwill with publishers, manufacturing partners, retailers, and consumers through several generations of missteps;
  • Minimal time to prepare for the Japanese launch, yielding a meager day one lineup and delays for several would-be launch window titles;
  • Shifting tides in consumer sentiment (sometimes people just like other things, you know?)
  • Sega being Sega;
  • Obama.

* I mean, maybe Sega just sucked at capitalism and that's totally OK. Would we really love the Dreamcast as much today if it had been managed by a more fiscally responsible and risk-averse company?

To me, Sega’s biggest challenges of the era were inseparable from its identity. The company’s deep-rooted stubbornness and rebelliousness – while enabling its uncompromising creativity and ambition – led it to hang its fortunes on innovations the public was not yet ready to embrace (e.g. online console gaming). At the same time, Sega continued to cling to established conventions which had fueled its past success and legacy but were falling swiftly out of vogue, globally (e.g. its arcade-centric ethos). In straddling the future and past, Sega found itself awkwardly out of step with gaming's present.  Sega was a perpetual pioneer yet it struggled to meet people where they were, or adapt enough to counter its competitors’ most basic strategies to woo them. Sadly — insomuch as we can feel sad for a for-profit corporation — the world was growing ambivalent to Sega’s presence and there wasn’t much anyone could do about it.

(From the What's Shenmue? Dreamcast demo)

In many ways, the Dreamcast’s Japanese launch reflected the history of this turmoil. And charmingly, Sega owned it. The company responded by promoting the platform in perhaps the most human way imaginable. Senior Managing Director Hidekazu Yukawa (R.I.P.) became the literal face of the Dreamcast to the point his image was emblazoned on a later edition of the console’s retail box. People knew him as Mr. Sega.

Sega’s Japanese Dreamcast advertising campaign was unconventionally humble and earnest, a likely reflection of Yukawa-san himself. Abandoning the brutish bluster of Segata Sanshiro’s salesmanship, Yukawa wore a friendlier face and carried a more genuine demeanor. Acknowledging the dire situation Sega found itself in, he made a gentler appeal to players. He was simply grateful for the chance they may invite the Dreamcast into their homes.

(via Advermax on Youtube) 
Yukawa-san was just doing his best.

The Yukawa TV ads rolled with the punches with humility if not grace. In an early spot, demon children haunted Yukawa’s nightmares, exclaiming they didn’t need Sega just before a rift opened and swallowed him into an abyss. And when production challenges hobbled Sega’s ability to produce enough Dreamcasts to meet retail targets, Yukawa-san dedicated an ad to apologizing for the stock shortages while fans pelted him with trash (gamers, amirite?). Meanwhile, his wife wondered when he’d be done with making all these stupid commercials. It was a pitiful ad campaign in that Yukawa-san and Sega actively solicited our pity.

So yeah. Sega was having a rough time even without a new generation of competition looming in the next millennium. As such, the company aimed to seize as much of a head start as possible, hastening the Dreamcast to the Japanese market just to get it out into the world. No doubt Sega of Japan needed to start generating revenue and building a user base sooner rather than later. So as a byproduct of that, there was little time to develop games ahead of the Japanese launch. In fact, the Dreamcast rolled out with four whole titles on day one.

The Dreamcast lobster

I recently revisited those Japanese launch games, so I'll ramble about them next...

A Farewell to Hidekazu Yukawa (plus a round-up of all the Dreamcast games he starred in)

Yesterday, Yahoo News Japan reported that Hidekazu Yukawa, the senior managing director of Sega Japan during the early part of the Dreamcast's life, passed away from pneumonia in June of last year at the age of 78. His family had kept this sad news private until now, but it is reported that Yukawa had been sick for the past 5 years (source). Our condolences go out to his family and friends.

Yukawa is nothing short of Dreamcast royalty, so this sad news has understandably led to many words of tribute from fans (and even former colleagues, such as Yuji Naka) across social media. 

Yukawa became an overnight success in Japan after starring in a series of very amusing and surprisingly honest commercials (watch them here) where he rises up from the depths of self-doubt (and being bullied by PlayStation-loving children) to spread the good word of the Dreamcast and lead the fight as the senior managing director of Sega Japan. This bout of fame resulted in Yukawa's image being used on Dreamcast console boxes (pictured below), merchandise (such as the Yukawa keyring also pictured below) and print adverts.
Photo kindly taken for us by KingMonkey
We too wanted to pay tribute to Mr. Yukawa, and thought we’d do it in the best way the Junkyard knows how - by geeking out about Dreamcast games! After all, what's a better way to pay tribute to Yukawa than to boot up the console that he championed so mightily, and play one of the multiple games he starred in? Here they are:

Former Managing Director Yukawa's Treasure Hunt
Let's kick things off with Yukawa's very own Dreamcast game. This simple game was released exclusively in Japan near the Dreamcast's launch and was tied into a short-running competition. The game has you play as Yukawa himself, with the aim being to dig up various tiles to complete puzzles that make up images of Dreamcast-related memorabilia. During March 20th 1999 and April 11th 1999, players could submit their victories online to be entered into a raffle to win real-life Dreamcast goodies, or even ¥10,000. 

The servers for the game have since been shut down, so there's sadly no longer any prizes to be won, but the game is still playable. In fact, it's also now playable in English thanks to a team consisting of SnowyAria, EsperKnight and Mr. Nobody, who released a translation patch for it back in April. Go here to get that patch, and for a more in-depth breakdown about the game, check out Tom's article on it here.

Shenmue and What's Shenmue
What's a better game to contain a cameo of the man that sought to spread optimism about the Dreamcast than the game that was touted to save the console: Shenmue? Well, Yukawa makes multiple secret appearances in Shenmue, and a much more prominent one in the promotional demo What's Shenmue: Search for Yukawa (former) Senior Managing Director.
Image credit: Phantom River Stone
I always thought that Yukawa's inclusion in the regular version of Shenmue was limited to him appearing on a point of sale display for batteries in the Tomato Convenience Store. But thanks to a great article on Phantom River Stone, I learnt that Ryo can actually meet Yukawa twice, although certain conditions must be fulfilled first...