Segalization is celebrating its 3rd anniversary today, after a rather busy year for our team. This anniversary article will be a bit different, as I’m not going to talk about the SEGA and Atlus related news from the past year. I’ll reserve that for another article, and instead talk about Segalization itself a bit more.
It’s already been one year since the Shenmue 3 Kickstarter was launched, and Ys Net have posted an update on their Kickstarter page to celebrate the occasion. While the video posted with the update uses mostly footage of areas that we’ve already seen before, it does feature Yu Suzuki, who looks back on the work the team has done over the past year.
Earlier this year, SEGA posted a promotional video to celebrate their 55th anniversary. Interestingly, the video was not just meant for the public, but it was also made to boost morale among SEGA employees. SEGA Games CEO Haruki Satomi mentioned this in a recent financial statement:
To better communicate the new SEGA Group’s mission and target profile, we produced a mission video and distributed it widely in-house. As a result, I have a real sense that employees are steadily regaining pride. Although the SEGA brand that we established around the world has weakened, we still have name recognition. By pursuing quality rigorously and continuing to exceed expectations, I want to regain trust and restore the SEGA brand’s luster.
Today marks the second anniversary for our website! It’s hard to imagine that we’ve been around for two years already. And while this year wasn’t the biggest in terms of SEGA game releases, a lot of changes have taken place at Sega, and several surprising announcements have been made. Below you’ll find an overview of some of the main stories we reported on over the past year.
Sega celebrated its 55th anniversary on June 3rd, and Sega of Japan posted a new promotional video to commemorate the occasion. The video takes a look at both the past and present Sega, including their consoles and games like NiGHTS and Virtua Fighter, but also the company’s more recent Yakuza and Total War games. It also features footage from Persona 5, and a look at some of the CGI animations from Marza studio. The video also includes a group photo of Sega of Japan employees, with Nagoshi at the center. With all the difficulties the company has known over the past decade, it’s easy to forget just how long Sega has been around. It’ll be interesting to see what they have planned for the future! You can watch the promotional video below.
It’s exactly one year ago that we first lifted the veil on Segalization, not really knowing where we’d stand one year later. While plenty has changed since the launch of the website, the goal we had back then is still the same, and that’s to get Sega to localize more of their games developed in Japan. One year ago the website was little more than a front page for our petition, but we ended up trying to do more than that. We found that it was equally important to spread the word on the games that we’d like to see released in the Western market, and that’s exactly what we’re trying to do now by posting news about Sega of Japan’s games.
Since Sega-Sammy’s acquisition of Atlus, we also decided to start posting news about Atlus games as well. Atlus has after all been quite successful with the localization of their games, something we hope may lead to them localizing Sega games as well. During the past year, we also entered into a partnership with SEGAbits. This involves cross-posting news on both websites, or us (mostly our team member InTheSky) contributing content to SEGAbits directly. We’re looking forward to continue working together with them in the future!