Thread by @gosokkyu

IGCC spoke to Sega's Hiroyuki Miyazaki & Yosuke Okunari about the Mega Drive Mini (part 2)🇯🇵

https://twitter.com/igcc_jp/status/1167253775561580544

games they personally pushed for

Miyazaki: Party Quiz Mega Q, Dyna Brothers 2, Alisia Dragoon (which was actually a request from overseas)

Okunari: Wrestleball; when they approached Namco for the license, they were like "we made a lot of MD games and this is all you want?"

(there's a story behind Wrestleball's cult popularity in Japan, the short version is that it's entirely down to one notoriously picky reviewer from a certain magazine who tore a lot of hyped MD games to shreds but went crazy for Wrestleball, I'll have more on that in the future)

the interviewer, Yasuhiro Ohori, thanked them for including Landstalker on the Mini, a game he worked on; Miyazaki's retort was "as if we weren't going to include Landstalker!"

they cite Landstalker, Shining Force, Puyo Puyo Tsuu & Streets of Rage 2 as obvious must-haves

one of Okunari's goals with the Mini was to include EU-language versions of games that were EN-only on Wii Virtual Console; Landstalker comes in Japanese, French, German and two English versions—Okunari didn't know at the time but the NA & EU EN locs are significantly different

(Landstalker has one big major between the NA & EU scripts: the NA version has a different & imo much less interesting ending, so if you're a NA player who wants to play again on the Mini, I suggest trying the UK English version)

there weren't a ton of games with EU-language ROMs but Light Crusader's another one, and Beyond Oasis/Story of Thor has the most variant ROMs of any game on the Mini: Japanese, Korean, EN-NA, EN-UK, French, German & Spanish

beyond language differences, there were games with different title screens and other regional differences, so the final volume is deceptively large; Okunari reiterates doing so much in such a short time would've been impossible without the experience, skill and passion of M2

after seeing the response to the initial MD Mini lineup announcement in March, Miyazaki wanted to reveal 10 more games a month through to July, but overseas requested the full lineup before E3, so they're out doing interviews now bc they have nothing else to reveal until launch

with regards to harware spec, MD Mini uses generalised hardware not dissimilar to Nintendo's minis, as it's the only practical modern solution for releasing this type of hardware at this price point; if it seems impressive, that's just due to of M2's cumulative emulator knowhow

Darius and Tetris were debugged on both the Mini and genuine hardware: they'd program something, check it on a real machine and then A/B it with performance on the Mini, so they should be compliant with the real thing; the existing games were also tested similarly

the hype generated by the game reveals was higher than expected; before the first reveal, they did things like asking ppl to vote on entries from certain franchises that some people thought was just a stunt, while others expressed concerns about the software volume of the(>)

(>)final system, or just complain "why can't you include both?!", which was fair enough

there was also an early widely-reported rumour that the MD Mini would only include 8 games, which caused them a lot of consternation

when they decided internally to include 30 games, they were planning with reference to Nintendo's minis but they came to realise just matching them wouldn't be enough—the fans wanted them to go beyond, and 30 games wasn't enough to properly encapsulate the MD era, plus (>)

the response from third-party licensors had been bigger than anticipated, so they went to 40 and realised they could probably add even more; SNES Mini had "20+1" games, so they settled on "40+2" just to one-up them (plus 42's an unlucky number in Japan)

why Tetris and Darius for the +2? Okunari had been racking his brain for MD games that had were complete, publicly-known but unreleased, a la Starfox 2, and Tetris was the only one that really met the criteria—Sega generally released everything they were able to finish, so(>)

anything that was announced but not released back in the day was not going to be in a release-worthy state

when talks about producing something from scratch came up, Darius met the three criteria: it's a noteworthy game, it emphasised MD's strength in replicating arcade games(>)

and it's a game that people wanted or expected on MD in its day that never eventuated; they also presumed a PC Engine Mini would happen some point and it'd include PCE Darius, so they thought it'd be fun for MD maniacs and PCE heads to quibble about the ports like in the old days

Tetris MD was re-released once before as part of the Sega Ages 2500 Tetris comp on PS2 and the ppl who played it said things like "I can see why this wasn't released...", so Okunari really wanted to offer a more accurate port and goaded M2's Horii into producing one from scratch

rather than trying to "canonize" the MD era, they wanted to provide enough variety & flexibility for ppl to pick and choose what appealed to them, and that extended to the attract reels, being able to see the game spines on the menu, etc—less "greatest hits", more "time capsule"

...and that's that, interview done