Interview: Scot Bayless

[Melf]

Through the turbulent early ’90s Sega of America underwent a massive transformation that resulted in market dominance. Employees of the company during this time took part in a roller-coaster of a business that rose and crashed almost too fast to comprehend. One person with a front row seat to these events is Scot Bayless, a former Technical Director and producer for SOA. Read the full interview to find out more.

[Christuserloeser]

Very good read!


- So there were three Mars/32X variants ? Hideki Sato's "Mega Drive plus" (MD plus SVP? & extra VDP?), the original 32X concept by Franz/Miller, and the final release version (modified in Japan by Sato to cut costs).

Bayless later mentions that 32X started on Nakayama's initiative, specifically assigning SOA's designers for the job. If that's the case, Hideki Sato's "Mega Drive Plus" concept (which Miller called "SOJ's original design" when interviewed by Sam Pettus) doesn't really fit in there.

[Benjamin]

Great interview! Looking forward to the inevitable Roger Hector article.

I did notice that he seemed to think that the "those guys work at Nintendo" line never made it to print, but I know the first run of ads did have it. The bit of information on Michael Jackson also seems to point toward him not being involved with Sega post-Moonwalker, certainly not to the degree where he would write music for Sonic 3 as many want to believe. After all, if he expressed interest in writing music for a game due to the Sega CD, why abandon that for the limitations of cartridges?

[sheath]

This is a great interview! Wow does Bayless seem to have a totally different demeanor about that time in your interview than he did in McFerran's interview. I wonder how much McFerran goaded Bayless into that rant about Sega looking "greedy and dumb." Either way, this interview needed to happen because of how unprofessionally McFerran handled the topic.

It didn't seem like Bayless knew much about the slump in '94, would you say that is correct?

[FoxHound]

Wow cool story about MJ..no interest in huge blockbuster movie based game Jurassic Park..but totally engaged with music creator of Ecco

[Christuserloeser]

I wonder how much McFerran goaded Bayless into that rant about Sega looking "greedy and dumb."

Sega didn't look greedy and dumb - they WERE greedy and dumb.

It didn't seem like Bayless knew much about the slump in '94, would you say that is correct?

I think he attributes more weight to Sega's incompetence in general than the market in general. Sega had everything they'd need to survive it, like Nintendo did, but they didn't because of the sheer number of mistakes they did. They had no clue whatsoever what they were doing.

Two years later, we were at something like 15x that many people. And a lot of these folks weren’t really that experienced in making games. I remember one very senior technology guy saying in a meeting with the producers, “What’s the big deal? It’s just a bunch of sprites moving around the screen!” Yeah, and Mozart just wrote a bunch of notes.

My point is that the massive influx of new people completely swamped the existing culture of focus on the product, replacing it with a focus on presentation. Now don’t get me wrong. Showmanship counts. Sometimes it counts for a ton. But if, at the end of the day, you don’t have something people are actually willing to pay you for, you’re going to find yourself in a very bad place.

[sheath]

I'm not sure why you would even bother posting this when the interview made it so clear that there was, at the very least, a massive language barrier between SoJ and SoA that SoA had to attempt to bridge. The "greedy and dumb" comment should be beyond ridiculous at this point, Sega was forging on in so many areas they really had no chance of creating cash cows in all of them.

To me this is the opposite of greedy, and only "dumb" when put up against the cash cow farming mega-publishers of today, you know the same ones who have entirely killed innovation in the industry.

[Melf]

Bayless is pointing out that the company went from a small group of really dedicated people to this massive, faceless monster that was more about sales than anything else. The same thing could be said of just about any publisher though. Just look at EA and Activision.

[Joe Redifer]

That was an awesome interview. I approve of its inclusion on the site. I can just imagine the atmosphere at Sega during the time. "Holy crap! We have money! What to do? How about EVERYTHING!". Kind of like a kid who got a hold of his parent's credit card with no spending limit.

I remember looking at the games behind Bayless in the magazine ad. I was like "I don't care about you, I want to see the games!" Batman Returns looked so cool at the time and I couldn't wait for it. But if they really wanted Bayless to look cool, they should have put him on a skateboard. Then he'd be totally rad.

[youloute]

Good read indeed!

Since SOJ gave up the Mega Drive, that makes sense that SOA was in charge of the development of the 32X. Though, I'm still not totally convinced because of what pointed out Christuserloeser. I know Sam Pettus' works aren't totally reliable, but I still have doubts about what Bayless said.

Another point sounds strange to me:

if memory serves, we started getting preliminary technical information about Sega CD very early in ’91. All the documents were in Japanese, and the guys in Tokyo just didn’t have the infrastructure to translate them, so we started hiring local translators just to get caught up on the docs. The first breadboard dev kits started showing up early in the spring. They were huge, fragile beasts, sensitive to electrical noise and prone to random lockups, but that’s the nature of prototype systems. By summer, we were in full burn, trying to get both our internal titles and several key external projects up to speed. That left us only a few months to launch;

Maybe I'm wrong, but I guess he wanted to say 1992. There is more than a year between summer 91 and the NA launch so no need to rush like that.

[sheath]

That was an awesome interview. I approve of its inclusion on the site. I can just imagine the atmosphere at Sega during the time. "Holy crap! We have money! What to do? How about EVERYTHING!". Kind of like a kid who got a hold of his parent's credit card with no spending limit.

I like this presentation of events much better than the normal contemporary "hurp durp, we're big dumb Sega let's make stuff, money good" that seems to never end. On the Advertisement with Bayless though, I am really not sure I've seen it. I remember a print add with some guy who looked comfortable with himself and the ad direction was to point out that he was, but he didn't look like I would imagine Bayless did back then. I guess it must be the same ad though.

Another point sounds strange to me:

if memory serves, we started getting preliminary technical information about Sega CD very early in ’91. All the documents were in Japanese, and the guys in Tokyo just didn’t have the infrastructure to translate them, so we started hiring local translators just to get caught up on the docs. The first breadboard dev kits started showing up early in the spring. They were huge, fragile beasts, sensitive to electrical noise and prone to random lockups, but that’s the nature of prototype systems. By summer, we were in full burn, trying to get both our internal titles and several key external projects up to speed. That left us only a few months to launch;

Maybe I'm wrong, but I guess he wanted to say 1992. There is more than a year between summer 91 and the NA launch so no need to rush like that.

That is another good catch. In early 1991, by all accounts, the Sega CD was little more than a CD-ROM attachment for the Genesis with no extra hardware. It wasn't until summer of 1991 that SoJ showed the full specs of the final Mega CD, which wasn't launched there until November/December, and definitely didn't have any SoA FMV titles ready with it.

[TVC 15]

Excellent read from a grizzled vet! Certainly makes the whole Saturn/32X debacle a little bit clearer yet also strangely more complicated than we first thought!

[chessage]

There has been much speculation as to exactly when Sega of Japan made the call to discontinue the Genesis, though all evidence puts it sometime between 1995 and 1997. Do you know when the decision was actually made?

Shuji Utsumi & Bernie Stolar would be better people to ask. See this as well...

“We have to counter Jaguar. Make it happen.”

Looks like Nakayama did 'the math'.

So there were three Mars/32X variants ? Hideki Sato's "Mega Drive plus" (MD plus SVP? & extra VDP?), the original 32X concept by Franz/Miller, and the final release version (modified in Japan by Sato to cut costs).

The cosmetic designs for the unit and cartridge were done at Sega of Japan as well.

[Melf]

Shuji Utsumi & Bernie Stolar would be better people to ask. See this as well...

I ask anyone who might know, to get as many perspectives on the subject as possible. Bernie Stolar isn't much for talking, so I might not be able to get in touch with him. I will definitely try to contact Utsumi though.

[TrekkiesUnite118]

This may be a bit off topic for Sega-16, but would it be possible to get interviews with people like Yuji Naka and Yu Suzuki to discuss not only what they did on the Genesis but also some of their Saturn Projects? Possibly even some of their cancelled projects (Sonic Adventure Saturn, Saturn Virtua Fighter 3, Shenmue, Saturn Sonic The Fighters, etc.)? I think those would be some really interesting interviews.