The boardroom at Sega headquarters was solemn and tense.
The long conference table was filled on both sides with company directors, every one of them wearing a grave expression.
Hayao Nakayama sat at the head of the table, his gaze calm and unreadable.
Nakayama Takuya stood before the whiteboard, having just finished presenting his "anti-poaching" strategy.
"So," he concluded, "my suggestion is this: let the Buddhas who want to leave go, and cultivate our own arhats. Use Sony's money to do our own work, and take this opportunity to expand our development teams. Gentlemen, what do you think?"
As his words fell, silence enveloped the room.
The directors exchanged glances, many of them visibly startled.
The proposal was far too bold—almost like cutting off one's own arm.
An elderly director in charge of finance cleared his throat and spoke first. "Executive Director Takuya, your idea is certainly innovative. But Sony is a corporation of enormous scale. If we allow them to poach our people so freely, won't the outside world interpret it as Sega showing weakness? And if they truly enter the gaming industry, they would become a terrifying new enemy to us."
He had voiced what most people in the room were thinking.
Sony's shadow was simply too vast for any Japanese electronics company to ignore.
Hearing this, Nakayama Takuya did not grow tense. Instead, he smiled.
"Director Tamagawa, you're absolutely right. Sony is a giant. But precisely because it's so big, it turns slowly—and its goals are very obvious."
He picked up a marker and wrote "Nintendo" on the whiteboard, then added "Sony" beside it.
"Gentlemen, do you think Sony's hoe is aimed only at Sega? No. According to the intelligence we've gathered, nearly every medium and large game developer in the industry has been targeted by Sony."
He swept his gaze around the room and lowered his voice. "Based on what we know so far, Sony has an internal project in development. Its technical prototype is none other than the SFC-CD project they're working on with Nintendo."
"What?"
"Aren't they just making a CD drive for Nintendo?"
Suppressed gasps rippled through the room.
Nakayama Takuya leaned forward, both hands on the table, his eyes moving across every director's face.
"That's right—they're developing a CD drive for Nintendo. But at the same time, using Nintendo's money, they've shut the doors and built a more powerful console for themselves. Their aggressive poaching of game developers is to form Sony's own first-party development teams for that console."
He paused, a trace of amusement in his tone.
"What's even more interesting is that despite all this noise, Sony has very deliberately avoided touching Nintendo's people. Don't you find that curious?"
A director reacted instantly. "They don't want to alert Nintendo yet!"
"Bingo." Nakayama Takuya snapped his fingers. "Nintendo thinks it's found a powerful ally, completely unaware that this 'ally' is planning to snatch the bride at the wedding banquet. This is going to be quite a show."
The atmosphere in the room shifted at once.
What had been heavy and tense was now laced with a subtle, voyeuristic excitement.
Still, one director voiced a concern. "We're also working with Sony on the Sega CD. Are we sure they haven't done anything behind our backs?"
Nakayama Takuya shook his head. "No. Our contract with Sony is extremely strict. They are merely our CD-ROM drive supplier, with no rights whatsoever in game development or publishing. We've also secured sufficient authorization to ensure that if Sony cuts supply—or even delays deliveries—we have the right to seek other suppliers or manufacture them ourselves. In fact, Sony has invested significant effort into the Sega CD. Most of that work was likely preparation for their own console."
He took a sip of coffee and continued. "Nintendo and Sony—one is the king of games, the other a titan of consumer electronics. Neither truly respects the other. Their cooperation was riddled with mistrust from the very beginning, and now they clearly have different dreams. The day Nintendo discovers the truth will be the day they completely fall out. When those two giants go to war, it will be a conflict that engulfs the entire industry."
He pointed to the expansion plan he had proposed earlier.
"And what we do is watch the fire from the opposite shore. While they're tearing into each other, too busy to look elsewhere, we buy precious growth time for our newly formed development teams. Let them fill our armory in peace, without external pressure. If Sony's poaching goes too far, we can always leak their console project to Nintendo and drag them into a quagmire."
"When those two are exhausted from fighting, they'll turn around and realize that Sega has already dug its trenches right up to their doorstep."
When he finished, the boardroom was utterly silent.
Director Tamagawa, who had raised objections earlier, leaned back in his chair and let out a long breath, a look of understanding spreading across his face.
Nakayama Takuya had already secured solid safeguards for the Sega CD, and his Sega-first competitive strategy ensured the company would remain unassailable even in the face of Sony's sudden rise.
Hayao Nakayama, who had remained silent the entire time, lifted his teacup and took a small sip. A faint curve appeared at the corner of his mouth.
He set the cup down, his eyes sweeping across the room. His voice was calm, but decisive.
"I agree with Takuya's proposal. We'll proceed as planned."
Once the president had spoken, there was no more dissent.
"Agreed."
"Agreed."
The plan passed unanimously.
A week later, the head of HR knocked on Nakayama Takuya's office door again, his expression glowing as if he'd just won the lottery.
"Executive Director! The results are excellent!" He handed over a report, his voice trembling with excitement. "Among our core development staff, fewer than five people ultimately chose to leave—and none of them were project leads!"
"Oh?" Nakayama Takuya accepted the report. The outcome was even better than he had anticipated.
"And there's more!" the HR director said excitedly, pointing to another section. "Following your plan, we received a total of seventeen applications from deputy leaders and core members to form independent development teams! These seventeen teams include the elite talent from nearly all our star studios!"
Sony had swung its money-filled hoe, intending to sever Sega's roots. Instead, it had merely loosened the soil, allowing seventeen new shoots to burst forth at once.
"I also heard—" the HR director lowered his voice, tinged with gossip-fueled excitement, "that a core graphics programmer from the Sonic team was personally called by Sony's HR director. They offered triple his salary and promised him the future position of head of graphics for Sony's console division."
"And do you know what he said?"
"He said the money was tempting, but asked whether Sony had someone like Executive Director Nakayama. 'Can you imagine an entire Pokémon-like world out of thin air and build a ten-million-selling game around it? If not, I'd rather stay here and work with legends.'"
Nakayama Takuya couldn't help shaking his head. "That makes me sound like some kind of mascot."
Despite that, he understood perfectly.
It wasn't just his personal reputation—it was Sega's decade of accumulated experience and success that gave employees an irreplaceable sense of belonging and security.
At Sega, they knew their efforts would become real games, loved by millions of players.
At Sony, everything was an unknown.
If the PlayStation project failed, those highly paid "traitors" would find it far harder to land good jobs in the industry—especially in a time of economic downturn in Japan.
Sometimes, stability was more attractive than a high salary.
"Well done." Nakayama Takuya closed the report. "Tell the leaders of those seventeen new teams to prepare their project proposals."
While Sony's hoe was throwing Japan's gaming industry into turmoil, across the ocean at Sega of America, Mark Cerny's team was steadily advancing their development work.
"Mark! Great news!"
Bernard Stolar practically burst through the door of Mark Cerny's team office, his face lit with a businessman's excitement.
The office buzzed with activity—programmers battling code on their screens, artists on the other side fine-tuning animations for various enemy units.
"Universal Pictures just got back to us," Bernard said, ignoring the mess as he walked straight to Mark. "John Wick is almost done shooting. Post-production is about to start, and they're aiming for an early July summer release!"
He paused for emphasis. "There are no other major action films competing in that window. After seeing the cross-promotion success of Captain Hook, they're desperate for our game to launch alongside the movie—another big win-win."
Mark Cerny looked away from the screen, glanced at his energetic team, and nodded.
"No problem. Tell them we'll make it."
His reply was crisp and confident.
"We're already in the final stages. At most, we need two months to reach full testing, and with polishing afterward, six months is more than enough."
"Fantastic!" Bernard clapped his hands. "I knew I could count on you! I'll go share the good news with Universal."
After sending off the exuberant Bernard, Mark turned back and cleared his throat.
"You all heard that, right?"
The office instantly quieted, all eyes on him.
"Our game is launching alongside a Hollywood blockbuster in the summer season. Ready to flood every arcade in America with our firepower?"
After a brief silence, the room erupted in deafening cheers.
"Oh yeah! We're hitting the big screen!"
"Mark, you're a god!"
One tall Black programmer even grabbed a model M1911 from his desk and mimicked firing at his monitor, complete with sound effects, sending the room into laughter.
Mark smiled as he watched.
This was the team he had personally assembled after returning to the United States. Back then, Nakayama Takuya had handed him a "blank check" and told him to go all out.
But earth-shattering ideas didn't come easily. To help the team gel quickly, he had taken on this light-gun arcade project tied to the film John Wick as a warm-up.
Even so, he had no intention of making a traditional "shoot-the-ducks" game.
"Optimize the recoil feedback module again," Mark said, walking up to a hardware engineer and picking up a modified light-gun prototype. "Weight and reliability come first, but the feedback can't be too weak. Players need to clearly feel every shot—not like pressing a vibrating button."
The core selling point he proposed was adding recoil to the light gun.
Naturally, due to durability and cost constraints, the recoil was mild. Its main function was feedback; the real "kick" came from the violent reticle jump and screen shake after firing.
All that shake data came from real shooting data provided by companies like Colt and Remington.
The gun shells themselves were direct replicas of famous models.
Whichever manufacturer paid more "ad fees" got a larger share of their designs among the first twenty thousand cabinets.
Ten dollars per machine wasn't much, but for firearms companies, it was a perfect ad slot to reach younger audiences.
Still, what truly drove the team wild was another system altogether.
"Run through the QTE section again!" Mark called out. "Emergency dodges, disarm-and-counter, executions—every transition must be smooth. Players need to feel like they are the killer!"
The inspiration for this system came from a suggestion by Nakayama Takuya and the film's outline, which featured the close-quarters combat style known as "gun-fu."
Mark Cerny's team had visited the set several times to observe Universal's stunt crew filming gunfight scenes.
Letting players perform those complex actions with just a light gun was clearly unrealistic.
So Mark took another approach and added several auxiliary buttons to the gun.
When enemies closed in, QTE prompts would instantly appear on-screen. By pressing the correct buttons, players would automatically execute flashy combo moves—blocking melee attacks with the gun, using enemies as human shields, or even disarming and killing them with a single button press when out of ammo.
When the idea was first proposed, the entire team was so excited they stayed up all night. A group of tech nerds crowded around the whiteboard, hammering out the framework of this complex yet exhilarating system.
Now, watching the suited character on-screen fluidly gun down enemy after enemy, Mark Cerny could feel something igniting in his blood.
He had taken this project as a mere warm-up.
But now, it seemed they might have accidentally created something truly unique.
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