SEGA Ages devs talk porting process, selection of games, changes, enhancements, and much more

Famitsu recently had a feature on SEGA Ages, which included an interview with the following devs...

– SEGA Games’ lead producer and director Rieko Kodama
– Supervisor Yosuke Okunari
– Senior producer Kagasei Shimomura
– M2’s Naoki Horii

Wondering what the team had to say? You can get a breakdown of the interview below, with translation courtesy of NintendoEverything.

- the project started around the beginning of 2016
- as a successor to the SEGA 3D Revival Project, SEGA recognized the need to put it on home consoles
- people such as PlatinumGames’ Hideki Kamiya and Masahiro Sakurai had asked SEGA why there wasn't a console version
- there was an idea to feature specific genres like a shooting pack, but they didn't think that would sell well
- Horii and M2 suggested VR games like Space Harrier, but the market for that is still small
- the team stalled for a year to try and figure things out, which is when the Switch came around
- this is when the team knew they should focus on Switch with their plans
- president Matsubara ordered the team to “establish the brand if you want to reboot it anew”
- when deciding the title name, they held a poll where American and European staff also participated
- the one that received the most votes was SEGA Ages
- Shimomura wanted the title to be the same worldwide
- Okunari is now working as a supervisor
- Switch was chosen because Shimomura said that they should first do it on a Nintendo platform
- he believed the Switch should be able to inherit the possibility of “Playing classic games with your hand’s grasp” from 3DS
- people from SEGA Interactive helped picked up source code for the titles
- when considering the era range of represented hardware, they need to think about it from a business time constraint
- the team aimed to create more than 15 titles for this project, with a pace of one title per a few months
- many of the games ended up being recreated from scratch
- for Phantasy Star, they added a new mode with lower difficulty
- they want to add a new method to make traversing through 3D dungeons easier as well
- for Sonic the Hedgehog, they’re adding modes included in past ports such as Ring Keep and Stage Select
- for the first time they’re also adding the arcade Mega Play version as well, and pllan to add even more detailed gameplay
- for Gain Ground, they’re able to output it in the original resolution when playing with the Switch being placed vertically
- Gain Ground was the number one most requested non-racing game in the ranking that was published at TGS 2016
- what they want to think next is what kind of new features are needed by these games
- when making faithful ports for the Wii’s Virtual Console, the fastest pace they could manage was one game per week
- Shimomura was noted as saying that they eventually want to aim to cover “all of SEGA’s titles!”