Toshihiro Nagoshi

Toshihiro Nagoshi is a video game producer, director and former chief creative officer of Sega. He is best known for his work with as producer/creator of the Super Monkey Ball and Yakuza series.

History
Toshihiro Nagoshi joined Sega in 1990, having graduated from Tokyo Zokei University with a degree in movie production, working under Yu Suzuki as a CG designer on Virtua Racing in the AM2 department. He had felt he had made a massive mistake and that working at Sega was a bad fit for him, but his timing had been fortunate in that 2D gaming was making room for 3D gaming.

Whilst many Sega employees knew 3D was the direction they wanted to go, nobody had studied the techniques of working in a 3D space, allowing Nagoshi, who had studied the basics of 3D camera placement to carve out a niche as an expert in the field, instructing others and giving advice.

Due to this role, he soon landed a role as director for Daytona USA, being promoted quicker than most of his fellow designers.

During his time at AM2 Nagoshi worked on many Sega franchises including Virtua Fighter, SpikeOut and Shenmue, the latter of which left him dissatisfied with how the game went and he asked for his own development division. However, before he could leave the Shenmue project, he was called in given the task of being both producer and director in the final months of development, as Nagoshi was the only person Suzuki would trust with his project.

In 2000, Nagoshi became head of Amusement Vision, his own development division and upon Sega leaving the hardware business, became interested in developing for their former rival consoles. He obtained specs on the Nintendo Gamecube fairly early on in development as a result and after talking to the CEO of Sega at the time who bemoaned the cost of making games, Nagoshi went off and created a super simple and inexpensive title called Super Monkey Ball, first testing it in the arcades as Monkey Ball.

Super Monkey Ball did not sell very well in Japan, but became a huge hit overseas. The CEO was impressed with Nagoshi, assuming he had planned to make a game that appealed to those overseas. Nagoshi had not as the creation of Monkey Ball had just been him initially trying to prove a point and he was as dumbfounded by it's success as the CEO.

During the PlayStation 2's era, Japan was beginning to lose relevance in the video game industry as gaming tastes overall became more and more westernised. With the only market not being catered to being Japanese Adult Males, Nagoshi decided to target them next with Yakuza (or Ryu Ga Gotoku in Japan). Despite it's success today as one of Sega's most profitable series, the development for Yakuza was troubled, with the first pitch being outright rejected by higher ups who were expecting something completely different from Nagoshi.

Luckily for Nagoshi, Sega and Sammy were merging around this time into Sega Sammy Holdings. Seeing an opportunity, Nagoshi snuck Yakuza in amongst other previews for Sega titles, and the new CEO of the merged company, Hajime Satomi, took a liking to it. The Sega executives were not pleased at this underhanded tactic, but through perserverance managed to get the project started, stating it as the most personal project to him yet.

Trivia

 * Toshihiro Nagoshi after creating F-Zero GX for Nintendo noted the differences between Sega and Nintendo's development, stating Sega was more flashy and having a more light-hearted attitude when it comes to new ideas. He stated if he'd worked for Nintendo as his first role rather than Sega he would have already quit the video game industry.
 * Despite this, Nagoshi had become interested in the videogame market initially after being given a Famicom and a copy of Super Mario Bros. from his at the time girlfriend.
 * Nagoshi stated that he was disappointed by the sales of Super Monkey Ball in Japan, and believes it was partially due to weak GameCube launch sales in the territory.
 * His team at Amusement Vision were said to prefer working on the GameCube to Sega's own hardware.
 * Many of the characters in the Yakuza games are named after people Toshihiro Nagoshi knows personally, including Kazuma Kiryu.