How a dreamcast quirk almost cost 100k

So, this is more of a publishing story, but I think it's funny everytime I think about it and is very relateable to what you poor developers have to deal with. b.t.w. I am no longer in the industry.

I used to work at a small US videogame publisher; we were licensed to publish on all the major platforms at the time, Nintendo, Sega, and Sony. We were known for putting out niche games we localized from Japan. Most of the games were so small that the big publishers didn’t think it was worth their time or effort and as a small publisher with a few employees we were able to bring over interesting titles and still make a profit. These were games that today you would probably find regulated to Xbox Arcade or something similar.

We made a deal to localize an independent Dreamcast game out of Japan. It was a very unique game and was developed basically by one Japanese guy. He had help with the art and music but he did all the designing and coding himself. The game had been mentioned a few times on import sites as something for US gamers to look out for so we jumped at the chance to localize it and bring it over to the states.

So we get the game localized and send it out for approval to Sega. Anyone who was in videogame publishing back then will tell you that getting a game through technical approval was a long and rigorous process. It probably had to do with the lack of online connectivity at the time and ensuring games didn’t need to be patched or your game didn’t kill the console. You literally had to test for everything such as, ‘what happens when you plug a second controller into the console when the game is at the loading screen?’. You had to get approval for everything, from the disc art to the instruction manual. After months we finally got final approval from Sega for the game and we sent the game out for manufacturing. Let’s just say when the game is being manufactured you don’t want to realize you made a mistake and have to recall your entire product and remanufacture everything. That is a mistake that costs hundreds of thousands of dollars.

So… I notice there is a commotion in the CEO’s office and my coworker tells me he is yelling at some guy in Japan. The CEO had put the build of our game that was sent out for manufacturing in the Dreamcast test kit in his office. The game played well enough but after a few minutes of inactivity the game switched to a screensaver of very scantily dressed Japanese woman. So the game we are currently manufacturing has a very NSFW screensaver of big busted naked Japanese woman which for some reason no one caught during the approval process. So the CEO, my boss is yelling at the Japanese developer on the phone. I have no idea what is going on so I pop into the crowded office hoping I might be of assistance and I immediately recognize the pictures of the Japanese woman on the screen and I say “what are my pictures doing on the TV screen?” Just like out of a movie, everyone in the room stops what they are doing and their gazes lock in on me.

So, before I tell you how this all came about there is a small bit of explaining and backtracking involved. Everyone who worked at the game publisher was gamers, you had to be because the pay wasn’t great and the hours were long. But we loved gaming and it was not strange to hear the CEO announce over the phone intercom during the middle of the work day that he had set up a Quake III Arena server and everyone would stop what they were doing a play a few death matches. At the time one of our big game addictions was 4 player Virtua Tennis on the Dreamcast. After work we would huddle in the CEO’s office and play Virtua Tennis for at least a good hour. Anyways with 4 players we needed additional Dreamcast controllers so I brought in my personal one I had from home.

Well at home I was playing a game for the Dreamcast called Jet Grind Radio. For those that don’t know, it’s a game set in Neo-Tokyo where you play as a youth spray painting up the town and avoiding the cops. One of the neat features of the game was you could download pictures off the internet to your controllers virtual memory unit (vmu) and use them as graffiti in the game. As a young man at the time I thought wouldn’t it be cool to spray paint graffiti of nearly naked Japanese woman on the walls in Tokyo. You know for authenticity. So I downloaded some pictures off the internet on to my controller’s vmu.

Well I brought in that same controller to work to play with my co-workers Virtua Tennis, and it was still plugged into the Dreamcast when my boss was showing off his newly approved Sega Dreamcast game that was already in manufacturing. And what we didn’t realize is that when a game for the Dreamcast has no activity for a short duration the Dreamcast screensaver automatically starts and if you have pictures on your VMU it will use them for your screensaver. Thus the pictures of naked Japanese woman were not hidden somewhere in our localized Japanese Dreamcast game but were in the VMU of the controller.

Boss said he was minutes away from calling the manufacturers to have the production line stopped. The Boss called back the Japanese developer he woke up in the middle of the night and apologized for yelling at him and we all learned about an interesting Dreamcast screensaver feature none of us knew about previously.

submitted by kingrottenboy to gamedev

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