Sega people say Sega things on Twitter

Going well off topic here, but that GamesMaster intro was in fact made by Trix, a Belgian company with some Silicon Graphics workstations, and foremostly intended for use in motion theatres - like the one that was at Sega World Sydney. There were many others of this type, but the one that sticks out in terms of the UK is the Emaginator, found in the basement of the Trocadero circa SegaWorld London's opening. GamesMaster even briefly covered it not long after they first acquired their series 4 opening titles.

These motion theatres are slightly different from the simulator pods discussed upthread. They often make use of multiple moving seats for each rider or two in front of a static screen, instead of several fixed to one platform alongside a projector. IMAX Ridefilm cinemas are cousins of these, albeit with only seats on one motion platform once more - and, surprise surprise, were also installed on the site of a few Sega facilities. Yokohama and Niigata Joypolis come to mind, as well as Sega City Mississauga, but there may well have been others.

At the centre of all of this is Showscan, the process and company devised by, once again, Douglas Trumbull. With these and the "Power Imaginator" mentioned previously, Sega presumably must've got special treatment after he helped out with the AS-1?

 

Ryoichi Hasegawa has posted a big old Twitter thread on that one bad Japanese video game history book getting continually slated by nearly everybody over there, effectively rebutting some of the more debatable things it tries to suggest about Sega in the second volume.

From the looks of it all, Hasegawa's points seem to be mainly centred on criticising the book's narrative that they ignored casual gamers, despite the huge successes of UFO Catcher, Print Club, etc. He basically contends both that and the misunderstanding of Sega as one company with none of the segregation between the consumer, amusement, and toy sides it actually had as the author's biggest failings - SOA proposing to change certain things in the Saturn ports of AM2 games like Fighting Vipers is used as an example to disprove the latter.

edit: There's also some noise towards the end about a "Cross Function Team", that apparently served as a bridge to smooth things over between the CS and AM divisions for the first time in the late 2000s. Miku and Puyo are cited as specific IP that it helped out on. This might warrant further investigation if possible (?).

 

It's an actual Japanese book - GSK has a thread overseeing some of the fallout from it over there.

Apparently others are even going as far as getting their own rebuttals printed, and I don't really blame them if the original book's publisher is already foisting it upon libraries, schools, etc.