Sega Ages Producers Discuss Virtua Racing, Wave 2 Games, And Dreamcast

In a recent interview mostly focusing on Sega Ages Phantasy Star, the producers of Sega Ages from Sega and M2 talked about the upcoming games, such as Virtua Racing, Sonic the Hedgehog 2, and more on Dreamcast games. [Thanks, Game Watch!]

Here are the highlights:

• Naoki Horii from M2 states that regarding Virtua Racing, which was announced for the lineup at TGS 2018, work is mostly on-track apart from a special function they plan on adding to the game. As for what that special function is… Horii can’t say yet, as director Matsuoka would get mad. He does tease later on that it involves “letting everyone play together on Nintendo Switch”.

• Senior producer Kagasei Shimomura acknowledges that thanks to some difficulty with Phantasy Star’s new Bestiary function, Sega Ages’ release speed has been delayed, leading to some uncertainty among fans. Despite that, they went ahead with announcing new titles at April’s Sega Fest and September’s TGS, because it was needed in order to raise awareness of the project. Development speed will ramp up in the future.

• Horii mentions that the next game programmed by Yuji Naka in the lineup is Sonic the Hedgehog 2, and that he gets requests to implement extra features that Naka wanted to add back at the time, but couldn’t due to Mega Drive limitations. He wants to try their hand at fulfilling those requests.

• The Model 1 board used for Virtua Racing and other games is fully working, so much to the point that they could bring out the Star Wars game if they got the rights to do so.

• Horii also clarified that, regarding Sega Dreamcast, rather than the Dreamcast itself, they are working on the Sega NAOMI arcade board, which shares architecture with the Dreamcast. There is a game in particular on the Sega NAOMI that M2 are working on because they wanted to play it, and they’ve presented it to Shimomura, seeing as it’s one that has really stuck with him throughout the years. Shimomura really want to release it if the first wave of Sega Ages games do well, considering that NAOMI is working on Nintendo Switch now.

• Finally, the Sega Ages team clarified that although the Virtual-On series is receiving ports of the first three games on PS4, this has nothing to do with them directly, except acting as a motivator for the team to do even better. However, if Shimomura were in charge of the project, he’d probably add some bonus content alongside the original games, like what is done for Sega Ages.

The latest Sega Ages release, Sega Ages Phantasy Star is immediately available via the Nintendo eShop in Japan and will make its North American and European debut on November 15, 2018.