Smilebit

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

~ the eulogy ~

Sega broke its development organization into nine semi-autonomous studios in 2000, on the theory that internal competition would produce better games than an internal hierarchy. Smilebit was incorporated on 1 July that year out of the second R&D department and the first CS department, both of which had already passed through the sixth software division and carried roots in Sega PC. Its first president was Shun Arai, known around the company as the aloha president for the way he dressed.

The day job was Japanese sports management. The Tsukurou! line let you run a football club or a baseball team as its front office rather than its player, and there was a horse-breeding entry alongside them. These sold steadily in Japan and essentially nowhere else, and they paid for everything interesting the studio did.

Jet Set Radio shipped in June 2000, days before the incorporation paperwork, and it is credited to Smilebit everywhere regardless. Cel-shaded skaters spraying graffiti over a fictional Tokyo to a Hideki Naganuma soundtrack, on a console that was already losing. The Dreamcast grave here makes the argument for what that game did to the next decade of art direction, so this one will leave it alone.

~ the dossier ~

~ where the name came from ~

The company explained its own name as a goal rather than a pun. It wanted to give people around the world a moment where they relax and find themselves smiling without meaning to. For a period Smilebit was also a sponsor of Urawa Red Diamonds, which meant the word ran along the advertising boards at J-League home matches in Saitama, several hundred meters of a video game studio's name in front of a crowd that had mostly never played one of its games.

~ the xbox detour ~

Sega left the hardware business in 2001 and had to find machines for nine studios that had only ever built for its own. Smilebit went to the Xbox further than any of them. GunValkyrie came first in 2002, then Jet Set Radio Future as a Japanese launch title that February, which stripped out most of the original's story scaffolding in favor of pure movement. Panzer Dragoon Orta arrived that December and is still the last full entry in that series, more than twenty years on.

The Xbox barely existed in Turkey. The PlayStation 2 was the console here, usually a modified one, and Microsoft's first machine turned up late and expensive with no argument for choosing it. Nobody I knew owned one. So the three years Smilebit spent doing its best work went onto the single platform that was hardest to find in the country.

~ what sega kept ~

The consolidation started on 1 October 2003. Sega's president had announced that nine studios would become four or five core operations, and Smilebit's non-sports rights and staff were moved across to Amusement Vision. Takayuki Kawagoe replaced Arai at the top on the same day. Jet Set Radio and Panzer Dragoon left with the transfer, along with older holdings like Alex Kidd, and what remained in the building was a company that made only sports titles.

Nine months later that remainder went too. On 1 July 2004 Sega reabsorbed the subsidiaries, Smilebit among them alongside Sega-AM2, Sonic Team, Hitmaker and three others, ahead of the merger with Sammy that autumn. The sports operation became Sega Sports Design R&D and then Sega Sports R&D. By 2008 that work had been split across a pair of internal division codes and there was no dedicated sports studio at Sega at all. Sega announced a new Jet Set Radio in December 2023, twenty-one years after Smilebit made the last one.

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