PSO is almost 20 years old, and when you developed the game, you were both in very different parts of your lives. We’re coming up on two decades since the game’s release. Looking back, how do you feel about the experience now?
Nishiyama: My impression is that we challenged ourselves to do something new. The Dreamcast, at the time, shipped with a modem installed, but nobody had come up with the idea to make an online role-playing game. It didn’t occur to me that it was something “new.” It was a groundbreaking idea, but I didn’t understand this fully at the time and was just scrambling to make the game. To look back now — and I find myself doing so quite often — I realize that I got to work on a truly pioneering game, and it makes me very proud. There’s been a lot of online RPGs since then, but I feel proud that I was able to work on the very first online RPGs for consoles. [...]
Before working on PSO, I had personally never played an online game, and I made assumptions about what online games consisted of, making it up as we made the game. Nowadays, I play online games on consoles and on my cellphone, and have been making online games [at Sega]. In order to keep players engaged with the game, it’s common sense now to provide additional content, downloadable content, etc. after the release of the game. But at the time, it didn’t occur to me that that was necessary. To me, PSO was a whole, complete game, and I had written the scenario in such a way that the game included an ending to the story within the packaged product.
In Japanese, we say “kishoten-ketsu.” It refers to the structure of a narrative. I wrote the scenario so that as you progress through the story, the tension builds and there’s a climactic ending. One day, Naka came to me and said that they were going to add an update to the game that would take place between stages three and four. So I had to come up with a new stage in the middle of the game. I was stubborn at the time and resisted, explaining that I had strategically structured the story and couldn’t just throw another stage into it. I remember getting in a fight with Naka over it. In hindsight, I should have just added something and accepted that added content was necessary to keep the players interested in the game. Nowadays, it’s just common sense, and I wonder why I couldn’t see that. So, that happened.