Thanks Kenji
As promised, our second interview of Yu Suzuki during the Monaco Animé Game Show is now available:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OgbkkLIT ... ZKyL5hoNCA
Moderator: News Poster/Veteran Contributor
Let's Get Sweaty wrote: I can only guess from the preview frame that one of Yu's jokes during the presentation was to take credit for breaking up the Soviet Union. Well, I say "jokes," but I'd be willing to believe it's true.
1991 The Soviet Union dissolved
1992 Virtua Racing______Model1
1993 Virtua Fighter
_________________ Model2(TexMap)
1994 Virtua Fighter 2
JM: Which was your favorite technology to work on of all the hardware at Sega?
YS: There isn't really a favorite but the hardware we used for Virtua Racing and Virtua Fighter 2 are the most memorable to me -- the Model 1 and Model 2 boards. It was the first hardware capable of 3D graphics, and I was involved in its development from the drawing board. The chip used in the Model 2 came from military equipment from Lockheed Martin, which was formerly General Electric Aerial & Space's textural mapping technology. It cost $2 million dollars to use the chip. It was part of flight-simulation equipment that cost $32 million. I asked how much it would cost to buy just the chip and they came back with $2 million. And I had to take that chip and convert it for video game use, and make the technology available for the consumer at 5,000 yen ($50) per console or else nobody would buy the hardware. But I did it. And because I was able to do that we were able to put textures on the Virtua Fighter 2 characters.
JM: Was it difficult to have these discussions with Lockheed Martin at the time? They were used to working on military contracts, and not with video game developers.
YS: It was very difficult. They told me they'd make it cheap, but their concept of making it cheap is selling it for a tenth of the price, which is still $200,000. Of course, Sega's president wanted it for $50. If you spend $2 million in development to make one chip, the cost is $2 million per chip. But, if you sell 2 million consoles, that's $1.00 per chip.
So it was tough but we were able to make it for 5,000 yen. Nobody at Sega believed me when I said I wanted to purchase this technology for our games. At the time GE Aerial & Space, CRC, and Evans and Sutherland were the three major companies with virtual simulator technology. And the USSR had collapsed and the government wasn't spending money like they used to on military equipment, and so these companies had to find other avenues of revenue.
[Source: http://www.1up.com/features/disappearan ... r.offset=2]
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