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denfaminicogamer sat down with Yosuke Okunari, long-time Sega Ages producer & Mega Drive Mini supervisor, to get some insight on "the Sega employee who's way too into Sega"🇯🇵 news.denfaminicogamer.jp/interview/1909…
they touch on the ATG Flashback a little: Okunari's primary role these days is in the Asian division of Sega which happened to be the contact point for ATG; upon joining that division, one of his first jobs was to write an internal evaluation on the product, and while he'd...
...identified several things he wanted improved, he'd arrived so late in the process that there wasn't a lot he could do, so he told his manager "if we ever do anything like this again, I want to be involved from day 1"
sure enough, internal rumblings began ahead of the...
sure enough, internal rumblings began ahead of the...
...planned MD Mini announcement @ Sega Fes '18; bc he'd been involved with prior product evaluation he was able to get involved, and the overwhelming amount of direct feedback received from overseas cemented the argument to make something internally for international release
Okunari took a while to touch Sega's stuff as a kid but when Beep mag ran a feature comparing the Sega mkIII version of Hokuto no Ken to the FC version, he went out and bought a mkIII & a few games then and there; that was back in August of '86, and he still has the receipt 
from there, he managed to sell all his friends on mkIII one by one, and because those games were rather expensive, they'd coordinate their purchases to make sure they all bought different games; as such, a lot of Okuari's favourite mkIII games are games he never actually owned
(there's a lot I'm skipping over here, it's kinda weird to summarise someone's childhood memories so I kinda think I shouldn't even bother)
as an aside, they bring up how Niantic's Masashi Kawashima learned to program on a SG-1000II that his parents mistakenly bought him when he asked for a Famicom and how he may not have gone on to make Ingress and Pokemon Go if not for that mistake
Okunari talks about how FC kids who bought Family Basic probably didn't go on to be game designers—it kinda sucked & there was no shortage of other games to play when you got bored, whereas Sega kids may have had nothing better to do, but then the interviewer brings up...
...Masahiro Sakurai as an example of someone whose inspiration to make games was Family Basic, to which his reply was "oops... but he also won that scenario-writing contest for Phantasy Star II, so of course everything worked out for him"
(I'd never heard that about Sakurai do I did a quick search and while there's not much info, his wiki does say he won the grand prize in a Phantasy Star II contest as a teen, and that winning that contest influenced his decision to drop out of vocational college. I had no idea!)
skipping ahead a while, Okunari joined Sega as a planner and his first job was on a cancelled fighting action game being led by Naoto Ohshima; there was a more senior planner working under Ohshima but he was reassigned to another project & they decided to replace him with newbies
as it turned out, Yuji Naka had just finished Sonic & Knuckles in the US & management was trying to get him back to Japan, so putting the new recruits on Ohshima's project was essentially a ploy to find an excuse to cancel it so they could pair Oshima with Naka again
after that, Sega's PR department was scrambling to put together materials for the Saturn launch; Okunari had a magazine background so he brought him in to help and even though he wanted to get back to planning, he ended up doing that job for the entirety of the Saturn's life
once the Dreamcast showed up, there was an internal shuffle and Okunari ended up working as assistant producer to Rieko Kodama on Skies of Arcadia, and further shuffles took him to Overworks and Sega Wow, working as producer on the hack-and-slash Sakura Wars V spinoff Episode 0
during that time, he learned about the 3D Ages project from leader Shimomura and put forward a proposal to remake Dragon Force & Bare Knuckle at Wow; only Dragon Force went ahead, as an outsourced project managed in parallel with Episode 0, and the project was not easy going
at the tail end of that process, Wow was being merged back into Sega and Okunari's job was not assured, nor was the existence of the 3D Ages line due to the dissolution of the tie-up between Sega and D3, so Okunari campaigned to take over the Ages 2500 online with internal dev
at that point he was in a nebulous planning & production division where all the lone-wolf producers were assigned; he was in there alongside Segagaga creator Tetsu Okano, Virtual On creator Juro Watari, even current MD Mini producer Hiroyuki Miyazaki
Okunari took lead on Sega Ages 2500 right after the VF2 port had been released, and the strong reception to that release reaffirmed that, rather than remaking old games which had proved to be divisive, they should focus on more direct reissues of classic games instead
(it seems there's a lot of loss leading with these various projects, with a lot of releases not really selling and particular ones doing really well, or projects becoming just profitable enough and just the right time for them to parlay into new series on new hardware)
(I've also skipped over a ton of stuff here relating to Okunari's pre-Sega days, hooking up with M2 and so on—a lot of it's been covered before and like I said, casually riffing off someone's childhood memories is odd, but it's all fun so read the full thing if you can)
