Sega Nerds

Sega Nerds questions Sumo, gets answers

by James on March 14th, 2008

Earlier in the week Sega Nerds was invited to a conference call with a couple of the guys at Sumo Digital, the development house behind the upcoming SEGA Superstars Tennis. After a bit of a communications flub, we eventually had our questions answered.

Steve Lycett clued us in, and today we’re bringing you a transcript of the conversation. Enjoy!

SN: For a game like SEGA Superstars Tennis (SST) to succeed it needs to appeal to a wide range of SEGA fans. What kind of balance did you try to strike in areas such as franchise selection and character choices, in order to appeal to both long-time SEGA fans, as well as relative new-comers?

SUMO: What we’ve tried to do is get a good mix of characters so that no matter how old or new a Sega fan you are, there is someone there you’ll recognize and want to play as. So we’ve got Sonic and Shadow for the younger audience, characters like AiAi and MeeMee for recent Sega fans, then we go back a bit to the Dreamcast days for Ulala and the Jet Set Radio characters. If you’re as old as me, then you’ll also be pleased to see some old favourites from the Master System and Megadrive/Genesis days return too!

SN: Given Sumo’s record of success with development on the PSP, we found it a bit curious that a version of SST wasn’t developed for the system. Could you offer any insight into why that decision was made?

SUMO: We’ve certainly got nothing against PSP! We had to look at which platforms we could do with the staff we had, and try and plan how many versions we could deliver all at once. Don’t forget the game is on 5 platforms, and these all had to be launched on the same date! That’s quite a tall order. Doing a version for the PSP hasn’t been ruled out of course, if there’s enough demand, I’m sure Sega would react to it.

SN: It’s been previously reported that SST was first being developed as “Sonic Tennis”. How far along in development was this original game before the project changed to SST? Why was the decision made to incorporate more of SEGA’s IPs?

SUMO: There wasn’t really ever a Sonic Tennis, as such. To give some background, when we finished [Virtua Tennis 3] on 360 and PSP, we were trying some prototypes out for a Wii version. One of the programmers had put in a bug head cheat, and when the guys from Sega saw it, they suggested we swap out the VT character for Sonic instead. We suggested doing a Sega character based tennis game and SST blossomed from there. I think since the suggestion of putting Sonic in there happened, it was always going to be to try and get a good mix of all Sega franchises in there, we’d never initially thought it would just be Sonic and friends.

SN: We suspect that there were SEGA characters or franchises that team-members wanted to include in the final game, but for whatever reason didn’t make the cut. Can you tell us some of these characters or franchises that you’d like to have included, but could not in the end?

SUMO: With such a character driven game, you always would like to get more in! We did originally plan to include some of the House of the Dead zombies as playable characters, where they’d use an arm as a racquet. I think we also looked at characters like Wonderboy for example too.

We actually prototyped quite a lot of minigames that didn’t make the final version, we had a Space Channel minigame for example. You tend to start out prototyping more then you plan to have in the final game, so you can try out a lot of ideas, and then run with the ones that are the most fun.

At the end of the day - if we couldn’t have someone as a playable character, then we tried to get them in as a cameo. So you’ll see for example Knuckles, or Mecha-Sonic on the Sonic courts, or the supporting Jet Set Radio cast in Shibuya.

SN: For potential future games in the Superstars series would Sumo consider developing new game engines? Is it more likely that you’d continue using pre-existing game engines? For example: if SEGA asked for a racing, or fighting game using SEGA mascots would you use, respectively, SEGA Rally Revo and Virtua Fighter engines.

SUMO: If we were to do a racing or fighting game, chances are we’d evolve the SST engine again (or the Sunshine engine as we now call it!) and write the extra bits we’d need.

I think generally, unless you’re doing a conversion, this is the best way to go, as you can ensure you tailor the engine for what you need.

SN: In the versions of SST that support online multiplayer, which will support features such as voice-chat and friend invites?

SUMO: It does indeed. What we’ve tried to do is make sure that no matter if you own a 360 or PS3, that you get exactly the same online features. So both platforms support ranked and friendly play, both support 8 player tournaments. They’ve both got the TV, leaderboards etc. We’ve also got voice chat on PS3, so when you win, you can make sure the other players know it. [Smiles]

SN: Finally, if you could add any one SEGA character or franchise into the game immediately, without a moments additional work (let’s say by the use of magic…) which would you choose?

SUMO: I guess it would be Ryo Hazuki from Shenmue - just to quiet down all the complaints at his omission. [more smiles]

SEGA Superstars Tennis is to be released in just over a week on the PS3, XBOX 360, Nintendo DS, Nintendo Wii, and Playstation 2.

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