SegaSoft

» see segasoft.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

SegaSoft was founded in 1995 as a joint venture between Sega Enterprises and CSK Corporation, Sega's majority shareholder, split evenly between them. It sat in Redwood City and later San Francisco, and its job was to publish games for the PC and the Saturn in North America, which meant a Japanese arcade company was trying to learn the American PC retail business from scratch while its console was losing.

In 1996 it announced it would publish for every viable platform rather than just Saturn and PC. That did not happen. In January 1997 the company restructured around the PC and around online play instead, under Bernie Stolar's tenure at Sega of America, and that second version of SegaSoft is the one that produced something worth remembering.

The catalog was strange in a way that reads better now than it sold then. Three Dirty Dwarves, Rocket Jockey, Scud: The Disposable Assassin, The Space Bar, Mr. Bones. This is the sort of list a publisher greenlights when it has money and no established house style, and most of these found their audience about fifteen years late through abandonware and retrospectives.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ what it shipped ~

Sega's marketing in this period had a tendency toward the confrontational, and SegaSoft inherited it. Rocket Jockey is a game about riding rockets around a field while lassoing other players, which is not a pitch anybody at a normal publisher would have signed. Scud came off a comic book about an assassin robot that dies when its target dies. The Space Bar was a Steve Meretzky adventure, which is to say the Infocom pedigree turned up here too.

Commercially almost none of it worked. The Saturn was in trouble in North America and the PC market was consolidating around a smaller number of large publishers. A joint venture funded to build a beachhead spent five years not building one.

~ the network ~

Heat.net launched in 1997 and is the reason the company is worth a grave. It ran matchmaking and chat lobbies for Sega titles and for third-party games including Quake II and Baldur's Gate, and it had a currency called degrees that you earned by playing and spent on merchandise. There was a collegiate league attached, HeatCIGL, with $5,000 scholarships as prizes, which is competitive gaming with a sponsor structure years before that had a name.

Read the feature list against what arrived on Xbox Live in 2002 and the overlap is uncomfortable. The difference is that Microsoft owned the console the service ran on and could make an account mandatory, while SegaSoft was a PC service from a hardware company that was months away from leaving hardware entirely.

~ the wind-down ~

Sega folded its online efforts into a new entity, Sega.com, to handle the US internet business around the Dreamcast, which had shipped with a modem in the box. SegaSoft laid off its staff in late September 2000 and went inactive, with some of those people moving across to Sega.com. Heat.net and the collegiate league shut down on 31 October 2000.

Sega announced it was leaving the hardware business in January 2001, which put Sega.com's reason for existing on a short clock as well. The joint venture had been set up to win American PC gamers for a Japanese console maker, and it ended a few months before that console maker stopped making consoles.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »