Developers

I have a plan. It's not a very good one and needs work.

First, everyone not responsible for developing a game would be removed from this category and put somewhere else. That means cover/manual artists, marketing people, corporate executives etc.

then, kill this idea of grouping by AM team or by region of the world, and instead group by profession. A category for

• Designers
• Programmers
• Artists (animators)
• Sound... people

possibly also

• Localisers/Translators
• Testers (quality assurance)
• Producers (if we end up with tons - I don't really know what Sega's definition of this is)

now, there are problems with this setup - "designers" would be people who actually put pen to paper and say "this game should be like this". Not those who manage the team - the people who took assets and made levels, or told Yuji Naka that Sonic should run around loops. Leading a team is a skill, but "managing the development of a game" isn't technically the same as "developing a game". It's a key thing to have in game production, but so is having a janitor to open the building in the morning. That being said if we are to cover everything about Sega... I guess we might be in line to cover cleaners too? =P

So for example, the development team of Sonic 1

• Yuji Naka - "Sega Programmers", "Sega Producers".
• Naoto Ohshima - designer/artist
• Hirokazu Yasuhara - designer
• Jina Ishiwatari - designer
• Rieko Kodama - designer (maybe artist?)
• Masato Nakamura - sound
• Hiroshi Kubota - sound/programmer
• Yukifumi Makino - sound/programmer/producer

obviously there are problems - grouping thirty years of programmers into one category might be a bit silly, but seeing as we're having difficulty understanding what many of these AM teams actually did, this strikes me as a more logical solution... for now. If it becomes unmanageable we may have to split things up again.

I get the impression that for a long while, a lot of these people would have been classed as "Employees of Sega" rather than "Employees of Sonic Team" anyway.

you might also have a "third-party developers" category too which takes any CRI or SIMS people we need to deal with.

this is not a flawless solution. If an aim one day is to cover everyone who worked on Shenmue, we're screwed (god knows where a "Periodical Motion Data Supervisor" would go), but for pre-Dreamcast and smaller games, I think it could work. Certainly should be feasible for the current set of articles. -Black Squirrel 13:55, 8 April 2012 (CDT)