Crunch culture at publisher Sega (of Sonic, Persona, and Yakuza fame) was so prevalent, at one point, almost every new Sega office was fitted with “nap rooms and showers,” according to three veteran Phantasy Star and Sakura Wars developers.
Toru Ohara, Takaharu Terada and Toru Yoshida – three long time Sega developers – recently recalled how the industry’s changed since the 1990s and 2000s in an interview with 4Gamer, translated by Automaton. One stark difference between then and now is that, just a few decades ago, Sega developers were “practically living at the office.”
“In the 1990s, every new Sega office was equipped with nap rooms and showers,” Yoshida said. “Even in the 2000s, the two Haneda bases still had them, and I believe people continued to use them. It was basically expected that people would be sleeping over at the office.”
Terada remembered that Sega’s nap rooms were around until at least 2010, which was the last time he had slept over at the office while making Hatsune Miku Project DIVA Arcade, but they were apparently “gone for good around 2012, if I remember correctly.”
“For projects with short deadlines, our only option was to stay overnight,” Terada explained, stating that sometimes he’d only go home on the weekends, while Yoshida said “whole teams” were “pulling all-nighters during the debugging stage” in and around the Sega Saturn generation.
At least, for some developers, there were times when it didn’t feel like non-stop work, though. Ohara and Terada apparently gamed together too, which was “also a way for us to communicate, and sometimes it even sparked new ideas. So I think we kind of enjoyed and valued those nights at the office. It didn’t really feel like a company, in some ways it felt more like a club activity.”
Crunch culture became a much bigger, more publicly discussed issue in the late 2010s and beyond, to the point where major studios from both Xbox and PlayStation were eager to tell folks that they weren’t keen on overworking devs anymore.
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