Sega Nerds

Sega West talks

Posted by Ryan. Filed under Interviews, Ryan.

 

DevelopeMag have an interesting interview with the three new studios of Sega West.  Mike Simpson and Geroge Fidler of Creative Assembly, known for the Total War series, Miles Jacobson from Sports Interactive know for their Football Manager series and Jeremy Gordon from Secret Level, Sega of America’s new development team.

Some interesting parts of the interview include:

- Secret Level were working with Sega for over a year before buy out talks even started. Does this mean Golden Axe has been in development for over 3 years?

- Sports Interactive have had buy out offers from other companies before Sega, but Sega offered such a good deal they couldn’t refuse.

- The Creative Assembly can now take risks that they couldn’t as an independent developer.

- Sega plan to make a knowledge database for all Sega companies to share their development knowledge.

Ever wondered what it’s like being an internal studio at Sega? Read on to find out…

We’re kicking off a series of interviews here on Developmag.com that profile select winners of this year’s Develop Awards, and we’re starting with Sega, recipients of the Publishing Hero 2007 prize.

Sega’s activity in the West has been resurgent of late, with a keen expansion of its in-house and third part development – in the past two years it has acquired London’s Sports Interactive, Creative Assembly (which has UK and Australian teams) and San Francisco’s Secret Level.

Earlier this year, Develop had a chance to grill the studio leaders of each of these during an internal business summit at the publisher’s office.

Here, we present part one of the roundtable interview, which looks at how the independent teams have been integrated with the Sega operation.

CLICK HERE FOR THE FULL INTERVIEW!

[Thanks to Aki-At]