Classic Game Postmortem: Seaman

[Music] all right um thank you very much for choosing this this session my name is you Sao um I'm a game creator and I am from Tokyo and I am based in Tokyo so um today I would like to speak about how I create Sean and uh with showing some other um documentations I will mention about the of difficulty in creating a brand new software so before starting everything I would like to introduce myself I'm a again um I was born in 1962 the year that Beatles released at first record and I started my career when I was 28 or 9 maybe so and the first one did not sell well so you may never know the first title but second one which is now here

known as Sim Tower made a a great score this is a kind a um uh simulation game of building a skyscraper and uh it's a really um released from Maxis as a sequel to Sim City so it did really sold well I'm a little bit nervous today okay we love you thank thank [Applause] you so simar is a um simulation that you have your own building and oh this is a very good video on YouTube so yeah [Music] this so when you stretch your uh building to a higher level uh you your Elevator Shaft have to cover more

stories so there occurs a traffic jump so you have to be very careful otherwise the tenant will be leaving your building and you will get less um profit so you have to keep the um customer satisfaction like the stress of waiting elev in certain level and you have as the skyscraper grow bigger you have to have more urb functions and so you have to put a uh like Hospital and schools some other Urban functions in it and uh the key is how to make your elevator very smart setting the priority like um whatever um anyway I don't have so much time so let's go to the next one I'm still a little bit nervous so odama is uh one of my favorite game I had made but I we uh it was not so much

uh successful in sales because we took too too long um it was launched after Nintendo GameCube was almost Vanishing in in the market and the brand new one was almost cing coming up so um but this is a very very unique game in the way that passers and St May and his damn luggage out on time then he get to do it all again the next day with five TI of I'm [Music] sorry this is a combination of pinball and a uh battle on the B field

I had game cre that wanted to simulate CR people with a voice command you are controlling these Troopers for certain directions as well as you hitting back the ball like a pinball do not not trying not to damage your soldiers but the enemy soldier it's a kind of not easy job um right it's a kind of crazy G yeah how many of you know this odama is you race oh thank you it's kind of fair finish oh thank you

all right and I would like to start about talking about but Sean so um if an executive guy of a computer game company came to you and asked you if you can make um guaranted game title to be a hit which option would you like to choose from all would you like to choose out of these threes one is it's a kind of

dragons and dungeons so that certain kind of Market is guaranted cu it has a large share of the video game and adding a little bit new future on it or maybe an adventure game using famous licensed characters of Hollywood that's also kind of guaranteed to be a hit I think though it cost a lot or a kind of rare Beast of game like nothing that came before it and I wound up going with option three that's going to be a Sean and there are several reasons for this I think for a Creator it's better to choose the option that seems to fit the best rather than the one you think is correct option three differs from one and and to because putting into the

practice requires invest inventiv inventiveness and courage um I'm a game creator who's good at making new titles my because I am not very good at making sequels even with my original title that became hits and that's why I went with the choice three although it looks as more difficult option anyway and that what led to the release of Sean Sean among the other titles hold the records of sales on the Dreamcast platform it succeeded in attracting the most new customers people who didn't own Dreamcast or Sega games up to the point the game also enjoyed the largest ratio of female fans

it even became a kind of social phenomen in Japan I will show you later about the TV program show introducing the Sean but this talk today isn't about how to produce hit titles then what the thema will be well when you're trying to create something completely new you're always going to find yourself lost at some point in the process I want to talk about how you find a way firmly out from indecision to accomplish your work so let's start about why I came up with this crazy game in the first place

it all started with a lunchtime joke all it came down to was me having lunch with my staff at the company I was running at the time at the time my company was selling one game produced by me I mean Sim Tower and another noname entertainment software managed by another team this application worked on highr MK and it let you raise tropical fish with a beautiful screen of Macintosh we have this huge staff undergoing this huge amount of research to make this app the faithy simulated the growth of living things we had actual aquariums in our office and there are staffers from agricultural colleges to observe them and digitize

them we were doing the kind of work research research Labs at normally do instead of and inside of an office right in the middle of the rangi rongi is a kind of very pricey place in Tokyo so it's a area like here so um it was considered that they were calculating things more minutely than and they actually needed to I was the manager of the company and I was jokingly complaining about this I am not making an app that cost that much time and effort to research for normal aquarium wouldn't people exact expect something that gives dramatic changes creatures growing feets and hands or going up on the land

isn't that more entertaining that's what I was saying to the staff around me and the staff responded by laughing hurly and asking me all the sort of questions about it I was on the roll at this point so I kept saying more stuff around the time there was a TV show on the Saturday nights with the famous comedian at the very end very end of the show he used to look at the look right at the camera and say what are you looking at you dumbass I thought maybe the fish living in the aquarium being stared at by a lot of people from outside may think like that way too and he would say what are you looking at huh then I said that I wanted to have voice recognition system on it to reply

shut down just let me sleep that's why I figured I'd need a human face and this reminded me of SE monkey a SE Mony um you you know the SE monkeys yeah it's real real uh creature I purchased this creature this eggs for is a um hot cheese and start swimming once it's put in the water the name of s mon key and its package design stuck around in my child's brain only because it took it looks so creepy to me so um I said now

if I'm going to put a name to it I it will be SE man not a sea monkey that's the first Sean's name was decided after this joking lunch my interest in my in this concept kept still running in my head so I started sketching it out and one day um I told about those ideas to my wife and uh she said wow I had this what a yeah what a gross and we dropped it out that after some time has passed one day my wife suddenly asked me how's your concept going why I I

answered you got to do that and I said oh that but you you you said you hated that and she said yes I did but I didn't say I this intered that was a uh that was a very surprise to me cuz um she really like that I mean she didn't say she like that but what I learned was um the opposite of hate is not like but indifferent that concept is a very very big change in my life and that LS to Sean concept also there is another incident right around then this became another trigger

for me to build a new Theory which turned out to be one of the most important elements of Sean I heard from my old friend that a pair of co-workers had gotten married this couple pretty much constantly fought with each other all year it always it always put everyone around them on edge so hearing they hearing they got married was a big surprise to me my old friend actually he was a manager of those both people uh smiled and told me hey satto son he he he said the same thing the opposite of like isn't hate right so right then and there I made a huge Discovery I decided to have this characters Presence hied by most people instead being trying to you know have it

being loved if you succeed to make someone having a hate for something all it can take is a single flip to of the switch for that to run turn into like in in the fact the more you hate something the more your mind becomes preoccupied with with it it made me think maybe this kind of creepy creepy games I was thinking of could gather interest from the people after all I figured I might as well go all the way with it actually I'm reading this it's so uh with two programers I started a kind of prototyping of Cen and uh with a very private reason I started here in

Berkeley in California not in Japan and one day um one executive guy of Sega came to me and uh he started talking about the new hardware uh and I talk about the they had a severe competition with sunny and they're looking for a very strong and a strange title which will be called The Killer title for the hardware now it's called Dreamcast so I opened up my uh laptop power B to the guy and showed the Prototype of Sean and he again said wow it's it's it's creepy yeah I know and that was a study that sea project uh really uh just started forward

uh so for my directions I settled on on pursing three opposite by oppos opposite I mean three major ways in which this game was different from the conventional hit titles or your typical game in general maybe more to be hated than to be disinterested yeah the first one is non cute characters as you as you may already know the second point that uh instead of having users project themselves onto the gamees characters we like we we wanted to have

them feel like someone's peeking at them from within the TV sets no actually that was the third one I was talking about I'm sorry the second one is talk about the reality around the user not a fancy world uh which means a um games in general provide General provide an alternate space a fantasy world or whatever spread out on the screen players Adventures around the space makeing new discoveries and so on however I wanted to have this game confuses it by mixing real reality and Fantasies that leads to the reality fusing into the with the fantasy producing a strange confusing feeling that's the second opposite

the third one opposite is how the game works from the users perspective normally a game story proceed with a game characters not being aware of the players in movies there's a this iron rule that characters can't look into the camera that's because audience presence must never be a factor this game's character however looks right into the camera he talks like the user like he's looking right into their living room the game us users the aquarium metaphor to make this easy to understand I worked to create a sort of common link between users and Sean during the development

at the time I thought I was going wherever my creativity and curiosity took me but I found myself realizing that I needed some guiding theories to lead the project to the goal if it wasn't for these theories I feel like I wouldn't have yielded to all kinds of suggestions and request and the resulting game would have been very different creating something that's never existed before is a kind of battle against indecisions when you're at a fork in the road you need a focal point to strive for and I concer this with these theories that served my boat

about the word theory is um here I mean the theory is something it's not so much established so if this English word is really correct or not I I'm not sure it's more like a hypothetic hypothesis yeah uh it's not yet proven it's not uh approved by the authority it's something like uh more unstable insecure that you be built in your mind so I I made up my my hypothesis and trying to prove that through the development so to make this a hit we needed to a strong theme running through the conversation with the Sean that could capture anyone's interest what is it and now we decided the direction as the daily lives of the players themselves talking to a p doesn't have any thematic

element to it it doesn't guarantee a hit if you have all these desperate themes flying around the players aren't going to spend their value time valuable time on it there needs to be a structure of understanding that players are working towards something or else the players won't sit at the control seat so to achieve that the conv conversations had to be themed around something that any player will be interested in what kind of theme would any player be interested in so our answer is that the daily lives of players I think there are people who aren't interested in fantasy worlds but but my theory was that nobody's

uninterested in themselves doesn't matter if they like it or dislike it so along with this Theory I started designing conversations to put it in another way the user shares his own personality and relationship along with the game's character and these conversations were structured along with lines of you race in a pet only to discover in the end that the pet was Raising you all along question two how do we make people with even no interest in Sega games purchase this this was also very important to me alongside the three-year-old dealing with this goest pet I made Sean to be

a thly dependent on the player I think that helped tickle the players parental Instinct and I think that connected in a big way to its success all at the non Gamers Market EXC me Sean's incredibly self-centered Behavior greatly reduces is the Players freedom but people seem to like that part of it you have this situation where you have to go every you go home every day at the same time but it seems that he's connected to players finding it worth doing I heard a lot of cases at bars and such where players said they had to go home ASAP to feed their Sean I also heard from many people about episode

where they'd go on vacation with their Dreamcast plug into the hotels TV sets and feed their pet it seems like being needed by some someone else energizes people you also see a lot of cases where if they are no longer needed that the energ deenergized people you often see this in the way the people retire from work question three how do we appeal this game in as so we decided to not to sell our new tech in the ads we simply use the term

raising new technical jargon sounds cool if you're are lining up in the event like GDC let's use this uh sentence for an example wow four player Real Time battle system provides exciting team combat or something like that that really scares users especially non gamers crors are tend to boast about what we proud of right but any any entertainment needs to have a structure of understanding because you're asking people to go through the entrance you've built I think you need a a trick in replacing Their Fear of the unknown with something they have already in their minds when a person gains an understanding of something new they tend to think of it using an understanding of something older that's why successful new

technologies have always entered Our Lives by masquerading us all thing for example cell phones these were very different from regular phones rather closer to the radio transceivers our doorbells don't have bells what you you did see was Raising giving food taking care of it talking to it once a day these phrases are what we used in what we used in the as instead of voice recognition Technologies equi equipped with the AI technology things we consider to Promotions with oldfashioned pet raising actually this is the graphic of the first ad of the Sean in the market

and that was done not for game magazine but it was done for women's magazines and this this is yeah something we about the question for was the one of the most difficult question to me um who should do the voice actor of the Sean does it does he have to be a famous One yeah actually this question was one of the most difficult one of this project games like movies can create buzs by casting a famous actor so this question H been the biggest headache and uh in the end we cast an actor who was almost completely unheard of for Sean

me I did that act this was the ultimate decision and the purpose of this was just to keep the quality of voice and recording to its most and this voice actor guy didn't cost anything and could do retakes s but they wanted they wanted I as a director didn't have to worry about maintaining a good rapport between an actor and director when the work was over I as a voice actor would have no father voice jobs so uh we didn't have to worry about rumors going around the industry like oh I did the Sean's voice and uh the director was a total pain to work with

something like that that's what allowed the ident identity of Sean's voice to remain totally unknown it was an incredibly unique decision that we have made but in the end project projecting this mysterious air was really effective for promotion this is true even for the PlayStation version that was released two years later questionis five yeah how about the voice actor how about the other voice [Applause] actor yeah we needed someone else to support

but just like the rookie political candidates benefits from a big name and actually we needed somebody very famous to support this unknown character and we Leonardo and uh that's my idea I don't know why I whated have him but finally SE America agreed to make a contract with him uh I I I didn't think it was a very easy job because he's really a star but um you know for the Japanese edition we employed a famous actor with a long carrier and had him use his real name within the games and Leonard Mr Leonard named his own name in in in the uh MC

also the results of that were great I I will show you h let's head over to the tank of running out of food for Seaman later but if you manage The larva well you should have no problem keeping Seaman well

fed at the moment the habitat contains two Gil men they appear to be I'm hungry give me something to eat I'm starving I'll bet if I you want to see some other uh videos don't tell your mother it's fine all and with claim raate guard they won't raise your rates just because of a claim that's why you're my favorite I

know it's good to be in good hands I'm sorry angryi [Music] csite no longer exists but I heard it was once a porn about Sean I just heard that's all a Dreamcast game that sends you to porn more like wet Dreamcast set the time since when did video game consoles start telling time I have a clock a Rolling Rock clock I don't need this I can wear a w well thank God for the instructions so you have to raise the heat up to a certain range and then just wait for the

egg to hatch all right while the game does its thing let's read up on a little history according to the manual the species that we will be raising was originally discovered in Egypt in the 1930s by a French anthrop bioarchaeologist John Paul Gass his hypothesis suggests that the creature was responsible for transferring knowledge and language across the land during the the third Dynasty the creature is said to be The Reincarnation to it you turn off the game come back to it a day later or 5 minutes later like me you visit often if one didn't know better one might assume you're quite obsessed or you have nothing better to do oh I have better things to do no I think it's it's not working very well no no way it's an official ficom disc game

that there was the process we went through to produce the g game it was released in July 99 a lot of news are and info programs on Japanese TV introduce it alongside the eyeball IA robot released by sunny and kind of uh as if they are saying as if we are entering a new era where we lived alongside computers Simon wound up selling a surprised number of the copies and we found out that the majority of purchas were women and a lot of players both a game with the Dreamcast Hardware system also to put it in

another way it earned a lot of new users for us things proceeded exactly as we theorized they would I was lucky to be frank I don't think Sega believed many of theories I put ex to them they didn't think it would say s that much I I agree with that so I learned that when they don't make the full planned order to the voice mic that comes with the game to the factory in Taiwan we run out of the pack we run out of the par part quick Parts quick and thanks to that we had a mounting of back orders having the Legacy Legend leag games sell out in the

market only further contributed to the near mythological air around it it was really good news to Sega as I've shown creating a new category of game isn't just about completing the game program and Graphics you need to you need enough consistency to answer the several thousand questions about it from the people involved all the undefined things that need to be pinned down if the things lost their consistency during the development it will break apart midf flight I have ever read uh an uh Journal written by the uh wife of movie director Fran is for

CA and this was um uh the book about the middle of the production about of a uh Francis Fort Copla and he was um he was um in the middle of the um uh the status being lost if the leader starts faing lost developing Falls into uh um really really bad situations and game designer needs to start with the faith and conviction that's stronger than Rock it's not that you are prepared for everything so you need to build your own theories if you ask me what the most important important thing is

though ask me if it's having those theor theories this is not what I said the most important thing is that you execute it not only to expl exploring um your theories in your mind test your hypothesis in reality and prove it as a correct by complete completing your titles there are probably several hundred people who come up with an idea almost as unique as yours but if there's a way to show off your inner strength it's by bringing that a theory to reality it takes one person out of several hundred to do that hitting an idea of taking you know a

talking fish is not exploit if we are allowed to call cement as an achievement we think of it as dumb because we did manage to accomplish this crazy idea as a commercial product and put it into the market so please do not be scared to be different from the conventional game existing games I encourage you to sim against a stream do not try to predict the future but just make it Sean had was blessed by a development team including Mr Endo arar royan suano Suzuki H who believed in me enough that they even quit their job to participate in this project I also got to

collaborate with a very generous publisher whose name is Sega those two parties are what allowed this to become hit and I think it provides a precious case study to look at I'd like to thank uhan who helped me the strep Lopez who coordinated my trip also Jos stoan for a great translation as well as Megan at GD who gave me such a great opportunity to be here and most of you I would like to thank you being here thank you very much thanks for [Applause] listening so um we have another 15 minutes so K song will be helping me to

uh if you have any question please please uh raise your hand uh yeah or if you don't mind we're recording audio so there are two mics in the room if you could come up to either of those mics thanks so bright hi can I go yes hi I'd just like to know how you decided what things to put in it understood cuz I got into a lot of trouble cuz it asked me if I was having an affair um getting personal would you speak slowly please okay yes so how did you decide what scenarios or what situations that it would understand and respond to so can I you want to rephrase that actually uh that was a very good question cuz I I

wrote the script I mean I wrote the the dialogues myself if I if we had a two or three or more writers we didn't we couldn't have a kind of consistency I mean uh it will be kind of um a mixture of uh several personality and that will be kind of very danger to entertain people because um sometimes the personality of see changes day by day and that is a very risky things so I did one person the key is one person does that and I did that from my experience so um I'm not a professional lier I just Express what I thought and and so Sima is something like a part of me actually and I did voice actor too so it's a strange feeling but if you you running your own studio right no oh no I wish I was oh okay but if you're too um then you what you have to be care for you that um um the tiny sentence tiny dialog

dialogues have a kind of personality in it and user will be very aware of that if if you have the several speciality in one program that's a very subtle but uh they will know so um and that causes kind of a tiny contradiction so um the key is that one personality does everything at once that's going to uh to the key to have a deep um personality in the in in in the computer program okay was a good answer yeah thank you thank you hello oh that was loud uh I'm on other side yeah yeah sorry yeah um could you talk a little bit about the kind of the weird viral marketing stuff like the strange websites and all of that were you involved with that and did it come to

be are you talking about the uh uh kind of weird history things yeah yeah um when I was 10 years old I my father took me to a kind of uh uh strange exhibitions that was um uh would you translate for me sure EX

I know you speak Japanese right does it make sense she's going to translate please go ahead okay so it sounds like so I wasn't involved in the entirety of kind of the whole entire viral marketing campaign but the one that was I guess stemmed from an idea that I or an experience that I had is that uh my dad took me to this

very unique interesting exhibit when I was 10 years old and it was basically kind of a I guess it's a maybe a history museum or an aquarium sort of SL uh Historical Museum and they had a creature from Africa called the sea yeah and it was um Ste so it was an entire exhibit on that and it came in different shapes and forms um they had um a skeletal sort of writing or a you know photos of it exhibits of it and I thought that was a pretty cool like it left a really strong impression on me so with C man I kind of wanted to recreate that exact same experience that I had when I went to that exhibit and so we came up with you know ideas as to as if this really existed in our world and basically had this exhibit or installation where we would talk about

the history of cmen give them the background give them the story and even have these mockups of like what Sean look like and um so that was something that stemmed from my own experience that I wanted to exploit and set really the background so that people would really get into the story and the history um of caman great all right so um in your talk you mentioned that you wanted the player to feel like C man was reaching out to them and interacting with their life as opposed to the player interacting with his world um technology has changed a lot since the original game was developed um now we have social media webcams and VR Etc um if you were making a game like caman today or if you had the technology that exists today back then what kind of Technologies would you integrate to create a more immersive experience yeah um I'm very much interested in what's called variable so

that um um collection collect the information all over the world about him and unfortunately iOS has a lot of the uh guideline um between the applications so one application cannot take the information from others right um Android is more easy to do that because um once let's say the application of Cen U detect that you got a mail from your gu friend but you didn't respond to that oh why you didn't do that what happened between that kind of thing I very much you want to do but I always is limiting that kind of activity between uh the application so um and uh this kind of things like uh I watch and uh Apple watch and some other uh devices um yeah it's very much um very much interesting but the first thing I just want to do is the the the things I I just mentioned like um um your activity in the other applications like you are

calling somebody so many times but you you you you you couldn't get any uh call back um he and se's going to start mentioning about what the relationship between two of you something like that is what yeah in that is totally different from that kind of sem in the way that this version has a scenaries huge scenaries but um to do that kind of the the smartphone uh games we just need a real AI endlessly speaking and that's what's be what I have been working on still um it's not achieved so I couldn't release a new version but that's uh one of the most things I'm very much interested it okay thank you thank you thank you okay question uh do you especially like writing manuals I'm asking that the manual that come with the game what is the manual the manual yeah because we saw cmen it has an

interesting history at the beginning s tower I remember it was very interesting because Midway through the manual you explained how the game was working at the very end you said I want this to put West and East in touch and you actually signed the manual if I remember well and that I don't remember another case so is there do you have a special interest in doing these kind of things writing manual is uh is should be the task for a producer I think only producer is always busy when it should be written so some other guy take over

the job as as well um the uh as company make the presentation of the new game but they don't spend so much time on it they um just to spend half an hour for the before the presentation in the cafe and bring that the producer spend you know um a year or two on that always thinking about that so basically I think produc should um like the theory uh throw this that kind of clue or hints to the ad people man writers of the hook or maybe axis uh the the because the the best game is the game that um people don't need a man game itself like the Nintendo game uh uh speaks about it its role the first I think so yeah but I did myself over

writing cuz I love writing and I didn't believe that kind of hired manual people temporary writing things is not always um not go finally the developing team have to take care of that I knew that so I start from the writing even far before the the game was completed so the man was kind of spec shet to the devop team almost yeah no that's the interesting it manual that adds to the game is not explaining it the controls is just yet anymore so yeah thank you uh a lot of things that today call themselves AI seem much much much dumber than cman seen then so I think you did an incredible job of simulating intelligence and if to follow up on the the very first question um which asked about how you created all of the unique responses could you give us some idea of

how many total unique responses you created in order to simulate that intelligence yeah um actually uh the first version of Sean is not AI at all that was a uh a massive um writ it you know written material uh did it and uh the number of the folk was um uncountable in uh thousands I know much more T of thousands and don't know at least the number of the jobs is more than 200 so should the combination of those kind of things I don't know I have never it's it's uncountable but uh the the cement is one of the uh um the job that only young guys can

do so now I need a AI cuz I I'm so much younger back to them but uh the the response is um actually English version is it was was done by some somebody else I mean I know American people so I'm not so much familiar with American version but uh in Japanese version yeah I we did a lot of um you know what because I was basically playing that role myself it was so much more I guess uh I had the pleasure and Leisure to kind of like play around play

tricks full around so it was just basically like a banter with myself and and that led to new discoveries in so many different scenarios thank you hi uh hello uh quick question uh do you plan on creating more strange games like caman or to bring back Sean in some shape or form the for the this five years I've been out of gaming industry for very private reason and I am I think I'm coming back and for this years what I have doing was something to create a kind of AI it's not a game it's a kind of R&D and uh so now I started thinking about a new game and it's going to be very strange I mean it's it will be like a very unexisting and uh I just started on that with a publisher in Japan I can't tell you that

well but um awesome it's a little bit related to uh Bitcoin uh it's something like U mining your own gold and make your own money interesting thank you yeah we using a blockchain Technologies yeah that's almost everything all right thanks thank you on that note it's just at 3:00 right now so I think that's going to be it for us today thank you thank you very much thank you [Applause]