Thread by @gosokkyu

Sega's Hiroyuki Miyazaki & Yosuke Okunari and M2's Naoki Horii & Takayuki Komabayashi talk Mega Drive Mini (part 2)🇯🇵

how many games did M2 work on? the first order was for 30, then plans for overseas & altered lineups pushed it to ~70, but counting all the regional variants (there are 7 for Story of Thor, f.ex) plus games like the 12-in-1 Game no Kanzume Otokuyou, that number easily doubled

there were also license negotiations going on at the same time, so they had to shift work around depending on which games they were sure they'd get; there are finished games that had to be dropped, and the team didn't always know what'd make it far in advance of the fans

Yuu Yuu Hakusho's a game they're pleased with, not just bc of the license but also bc they added USB hub support for the multitap; M2 was involved with the making of the OG MD multitap so when YYH came up Horii said "I know there's no time but let us do this!" but they weren't(>)

sure how or if it'd happen due to the immense amount of debugging it'd take; they made it work by narrowing official support to Buffalo-brand USB hubs, a deal that came about by Miyazaki recklessly cold-calling the number he'd given, which turned out to be a standard sales office

(btw, according to this test from a couple months ago, the Mini really does only recognise the controllers/USB hubs listed as officially supported on their websites, I guess they manually limited recognition for the sake of debugging)

they also really wanted to include Gauntlet IV, which was M2's first commercial work & one made in tandem with the OG MD multitap, but as Okunari explains, even tho many games in the final lineup look like easy inclusions, adding Gauntlet would have required others to be dropped

what pushed them to make the jump from software collections to hardware? simply put, it was the NES Classic—not only did it prove there was a big market for such products, it also sparked enthusiasm from the president down: "what about the Sega maniacs? where's their 'Mini'"?

buffalo.jp/topics/special…🇯🇵

while they regret losing certain games, they're also grateful for a few things—they decided to announce the delay just ahead of TGS18 for the sake of intl media & PS Classic was announced later that afternoon, so if they'd waited, it would have looked like a reaction to PSClassic

of course, they announced with a rock-solid September 19 release date only for Nintendo to later announced the Switch Lite for September 20, so they couldn't win em all

on their fav games, Miyazaki picks Lord Monarch MD: not only is it a good game & a demonstration of Sega's healthy second-party output but it was made by Omiya Soft, the creators of Culdcept; Culdcept DS, which he helped debug, is his GOAT & he played 400hrs/month when it was new

Okunari joined Sega during the Saturn era so he's thrilled to finally officially work on MD after 25 years; he's most excited about the new inclusions, Darius and Tetris—Darius was something they were constantly plugging away at, but Tetris was announced and finished last-minute

the specific issue with Tetris is that The Tetris Company insists on new games behaving a certain way; they were able to reissue OG Sega Tetris on PS2 because they bundled in a guideline-compliant version, but this port is pure OG & they were worried TTC didn't quite understand…

…that point, so they were working with the full understanding that it could be shelved at any moment; it was an unreasonable request to even make it at all so M2 president Horii directly managed the production of the port, which kept MD Mini director Komabayashi out of the loop

Komabayshi's favs: Ghouls 'n Ghosts, which he'd play while he waited for builds to compile and ended up clearing three times a day, six times a week, as well as Shinobi III, which he can no clear on the hardest difficulty with no shurikens thanks to all the practice he got

part of Komabayashi's role while debugging was to create save states at spots within games that would need to be addressed or corrected in emulation; in that sense, Fatal Labyrinth (included in Game no Kanzume) & Mega Man Wily Wars were tough to debug due to being highly variable

M2's last MD emulator was for 3DS & it used a lot of high-level, game-specific shortcuts for the sake of performance, so when that base was then applied to different Mini games it caused issues, so for a little while it was like "this game was fine a decade ago, what happened?"

they also learned they were getting dozens of MD Mini preorders from the younger members of Sega's debug team—even though they'd played countless hours at work, the games were new and exciting to them and they guessed they wanted to play the games they couldn't play on the clock

on whether the MD Mini reaffirmed anything about the appeal of the MD, they said that above all, it reminded them of Sega's strength with arcade games, and how being able to offer arcades games like GnG and Golden Axe at home with relative accuracy was a big deal to players

will there be future updates or fixes via USB? no

have they considered official MD Mini cafes or other public installations? not officially, although it sounds interesting; there are official carry bags, and it's easy to bring places for unofficial gatherings

M2's Horii had to issue a company-wide ban on playing Yuu Yuu Hakusho at work and Okunari says they had a similar ban at Sega back when the original MD version came out—he'd come and "debug" the game on his lunch breaks and off the clock, not bc anybody asked but bc it was fun

the live events they did to announce games for the Mini were fun and they're going to try and do more of those where possible; there's another one scheduled for an event M2's running with BEEP Shop for their own products on September 7

...and that's it, may your timelines return to normal

oh, and there was an error in the article that incorrectly stated the director can no-miss, no-shuriken clear Shinobi III on the hardest difficulty—the game in question is actually Revenge of Shinobi, do not question his skill, thx