Sega Technical Institute

~ the obit ~

I was not online yet when this one ended. Sega Technical Institute closed at the end of 1996 and my first dial-up connection was in 1998, so everything below is reconstruction from documents and from interviews the people involved gave much later, mostly after they had stopped being careful about it.

Mark Cerny founded STI in January 1990. He had come from Atari, where he had designed Marble Madness as a teenager, and he had then spent years in Japan at Sega working in Japanese. The pitch he sold to Sega was a training institute in the literal sense: bring senior Japanese developers to California, put American hires next to them, and in a few years you have American teams who can build to the Japanese standard. Sega of America agreed and gave him a building.

For about two years it looked like it was working. Yuji Naka and Hirokazu Yasuhara came over from Sonic Team after the first Sonic and worked out of California on the sequel. Sonic the Hedgehog 2 shipped in November 1992, sold past six million copies, and remains the best-selling thing anyone at STI ever touched. Then Naka went back to Japan, and no Sonic Team programmer of that rank ever worked out of California again.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the experiment ~

The studio's output in its middle years reads like two different companies sharing a logo. Dick Tracy in 1991 was a flop. Kid Chameleon in 1992 was a genuinely strange and difficult platformer that a lot of people remember fondly. Sonic Spinball got built in about four months to fill a hole in the 1993 holiday lineup and sold well anyway. Sonic 3 and Sonic & Knuckles came out in 1994 as one game split in half by a cartridge deadline and a lock-on connector.

Comix Zone in 1995 is the one that argues for the place. It put the player inside comic panels and drew the villain's hand into the frame to ink new obstacles onto the page. Nothing else on the Mega Drive looked like it. It also sold badly, arriving in the machine's last commercial year against a Saturn that Sega was already busy failing to launch.

~ the friction ~

The cultural transfer went one direction and stopped. Japanese staff at STI worked the hours they had worked in Tokyo, which meant nights and weekends as a baseline. The American staff kept American hours and considered that professional. Each side read the other's schedule as a statement about how seriously they took the work, and neither read was wrong from inside its own assumptions.

Naka's refusal to work with the American teams again after Sonic 2 was the clearest signal, and it was not a small one, because he was the most valuable programmer Sega had. What had been sold as a school became a building where two groups made separate games and avoided each other. Cerny left, and Roger Hector took over.

~ the last project ~

Sonic X-treme was supposed to be the Saturn's flagship Sonic and it consumed the studio's final two years. The team was split between an engine group and a boss group who did not get along. In April 1996 the executive Bernie Stolar handed over Sonic Team's 3D Saturn tools, the ones built for Nights into Dreams, without asking Yuji Naka. Naka found out, was furious, and within two weeks Stolar had to tell the team to stop using them. Weeks of work went in the bin.

Then the two people holding it together got sick. Programmer Chris Coffin came down with walking pneumonia and lead designer Chris Senn became ill enough to be told he had six months to live. With an October deadline and both of them out, producer Mike Wallis canceled the game in August 1996. Roger Hector's account of what followed puts the blame a level up: the PlayStation was winning, Sega of America was in open turmoil about it, and STI got dissolved in the reshuffle and rebuilt as a product development department. Some of the staff went on to Luxoflux. The Saturn never did get its Sonic.

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