An interview with David Perkinson - Producer of NFL 2K and World Series Baseball on the SEGA Dreamcast

Before 2K Sports, It Was Simply: SEGA Sports.

Some of us like to think that science is apolitical. We like to imagine that global, collaborating scientists choose to ignore the lines in our Apple or Google Maps that trace the boundaries of sovereign nations all in the name of research. And sometimes we are right.

It follows then that the inception of SEGA Sports' World Series Baseball on the SEGA Dreamcast is a story of in-house rivals sharing ideas across miles of oceans. This was possible partly because game design is its own science; its own language — not limited by geopolitical or even cultural constructs. Perhaps it is no wonder then that SEGA of America and SEGA of Japan shared SEGA Dreamcast technology that would become the foundation to iconic SEGA Sports game franchises.

Before the corruption of 2K Sports as we now know it, it was SEGA Sports. I spoke with former SEGA Sports producer David Perkinson (World Series Baseball, NFL 2K, Heavy Rain) to discuss how SEGA Sports was shaped in its defining Dreamcast era.

Credit: Sega Retro

Steven Montani: How did you end up at SEGA?

David Perkinson: Yeah, that’s a good question! I graduated from college in the Spring of ’93. I went to school in Ohio, and my sister and her husband lived in San Francisco. My sister had been doing some work at the time with kind of a small, wannabe-publisher, and they had a few games they were working on. At the time, CES was the big gameshow pre-E3. At the time, CES was in Chicago, and I was in Ohio and they wanted somebody to work the booth. I did some work for this company, and I was not being asked for too much. I helped people play, rebooted systems, and handed out pamphlets. CES ended and they asked me if I wanted to come work for them in the Bay Area for the summer. So I did. I flew out there and I began working for them without any real defined terms. Neither party knew if it would be a long-term thing, short-term thing or whatever. I worked there a couple of months at the time, sending reviewable builds out to media people and general stuff around the office. I just graduated from college and my friends had graduated from college and it was going to be our last summer together so I decided I was going to head back home. I left that gig. And then committed myself to moving back to the Bay Area. My sister was there. I had an easy in. I drove from Ohio, got to the Bay Area on the Saturday of Labor Day weekend.

I saw an ad in the paper that said: “growing software publisher needs testers.“ It did not say who it was. Since I just had done that, I decided to apply. Applied on Monday. Got the job on Tuesday. And then I was around SEGA in different incarnations, always working on SEGA stuff, for about ten years. I started out in [quality assurance], spent maybe about a year in QA, and then moved into production. I always had an affinity for the sports stuff, so I began working on the Genesis sports stuff. That transitioned into 32X and the Saturn, and then into Dreamcast, and ultimately into publishing SEGA Sports or ESPN video games even, developed by SEGA and Visual Concepts for other platforms.

My role kind of increased. I was assistant producer, associate producer, producer, and then doing all kinds of stuff. Like taking on projects from SEGA of Japan, working with developers in the United States on stuff from scratch. Almost all of it in the sports realm.

NFL's Greatest: San Francisco vs. Dallas 1978-1993 - one of the earliest games David worked on as a tester.

Did you have a passion for sports beforehand, before entering the game industry? Or did it develop while you were there?

I played an embarrassing amount of Techmo Bowl in college. Blades of Steel, Double Dribble on Nintendo Entertainment System was kind of a fun one. It had that hook shot from the corner that was kind of a bug that the shot was never missed. I was always a huge sports fan growing up — it was a passion of mine and so I kind of fell into it naturally. When I got on sports games working in QA, I just had a good connection with them and built really good working connections with the production teams on the SEGA side, and developers on development side.

So that was an MBA of sorts in production, in game development, and in publishing during your time there…

Yeah! One of the great things about it was that the group of people working there — it was a really eclectic group of people, a lot of whom got their start at the same time as I did, who were still in there doing really cool stuff. They accomplished great things in games, or whether they moved into other areas of software development. We had writers, actors, musicians, just the gambit of creative people that worked there. We were kind of like-minded. I consider myself incredibly fortunate, right place at the right time.

That’s one part of it. The other part of it that made it so interesting and kind of challenging — every hardware generation, the rules completely changed. The expectations would change. The technology would change. The things you had to work on and think about and the tools used to develop the games and the complexity and the visual improvement — all of it was constantly evolving. You could always apply lessons before of making successful products, but there was a fair amount of improvisation in every hardware generation. You really had to think quickly and problem solve, and find a way to execute the best product given the constraints. Super-fun.

That is in line with some of the documentaries I’ve seen on SEGA. Where SEGA had been considered, maybe back in those days, like how we'd see modern indie studios — an eclectic personality to the entire studio. People were not afraid to take risks, explore avenues with their creativity and mess with different mediums mixing different disciplines.

Even outside of the sports stuff, you had all of types of creativity coming from SEGA of Japan. Just legendary designers making incredibly famous products. There was a fearlessness and spirit of innovation that led them to take risks. Even if the games did not blow out sales, those innovations would drive something else that would show up in some other product that could make that successful and shine. At SEGA of America, even outside of the sports world. I think of stuff like Ecco the Dolphin. Incredibly creative game.

I’m fascinated to hear that SEGA Japan were sharing assets and ideas with SEGA of America. When it comes to gaming and design, that could be a language in itself. It seems like it translated well between the two offices.

There were a fair amount of SEGA Sports products that were published in the U.S. and shared with Japan. And there was also great stuff that came from Japan. The World Series Baseball games on Saturn were developed by SEGA of Japan, originally made with Japanese league teams. What we did in the U.S. is that we added features to the game that were tuned for baseball in the U.S. and of course players and teams. Boy, that was World Series [Baseball]. WSB 2, WSB ‘98 Saturn were all SEGA of Japan, but with production from SOA and me in the United States. WSB ‘98 was the first one that started to do 3D rendering, polygon-based characters instead of 2D sprites. That was the big evolution on Saturn. That really sets the tone in the evolution in particular for the Dreamcast. We were just able to do more in terms of player specific details, camera in places in environment.

I could see the work that went into the camera angles. So unique. It had the bokeh effect with the background and focused on the player. It made the players pop. Everything in the replays popped. [It felt like a new medium playing Dreamcast.]

When you make that jump…when you look at the 2D games, it was an attempt to make it look like a television broadcast. With the 3D stuff, you can put the camera where you want to put it; to highlight moments of excitement, draw attention of a replay or highlight something spectacular or unique. When we were doing stuff for Xbox later, I was asked to go down where there was a brief period time in between SEGA Sports branding and the 2K Sports branding. SEGA Sports carried the ESPN sports license. Since we were doing ESPN video games, I was asked to go to Dodger Stadium in the production truck, recording HD footage that we would use to make a fictitious all-star game. The producer for the ESPN game was lamenting that he could not get the camera angles that gaming could get: “You can put the camera wherever you want it. I can’t do it.”

And now, when you watch an NFL broadcast and you have that NFL camera flying over the field on the wires, that to me, is completely inspired by gaming. That is television production drawing from the gaming world and how sports games are presented to the player. It is an indication of creative and technical side to sports games.

Were those some of the decisions you made directly? What were some of the proudest moments that you worked on in the sports games?

Yeah, there were so many. I am proud of those projects. You put so much of yourself into them. In particular, it is probably NFL 2K for the Dreamcast launch with Visual Concepts. I was the producer on the SEGA side working with VC. We built that game from nothing for Dreamcast. Really having those conversations around camera placement, and animation and voice-over. The things we wanted to make that game pop, and separate it from Madden. The goal was not to…out-Madden, Madden. The goal was to make something completely different and revolutionary. The gameplay had tons of innovation. But the presentation component made it different. We had specific conversation around how we wanted to do that, being differentiators. We did 14 days of motion capture with NFL players. Thousands of pages of dialogue. The voice actors were used instead of real broadcasters. A real evolution in voice-over scripting and execution, gameplay presentation, overlay, replay, gameplay innovations.

Also at that time we started with a team called Blue Shift and built World Series Baseball [2K2] for the Dreamcast from scratch. You asked me about the arcade port.

There were a couple of arcade ports. World Series '99 was an arcade game that led me to you actually. I had never seen it before and found it on YouTube. And then I realized that it was part of a line from Japan named SEGA Dynamite Baseball. And then…I saw the game for Dreamcast with Pedro Martinez on the cover.

That might have been World Series Baseball 2K[1]. After that, was [World Series Baseball 2K2,] the game we launched in the U.S. with Blue Shift. That was gratifying. The first year was tough. We got it out, a little bit late, but the foundation had been laid. We were able to put time and attention in the presentation, player specific details, animations. Cool double-play animations. Park specific homerun animations. If you hit the homerun at Shae Stadium, you see the apple rise. Or if you put one in the water in PacBell park in San Francisco, there would be a cutscene of the splash. Location specific and player specific details. Lots of highly tailored voice-over work. Attention to gameplay — making it easy to learn and hard to master. And also, you felt the difference between players. And the players felt true the players themselves. Pitching arsenals or attributes. Those two things I kind of look at. NFL 2K and World Series Baseball 2K[2].

I think the other thing that stands out was the teamwork and effort and collaboration. When the teams are cohesive and focused on achieving quality, not just timeliness, but really high quality — it shows. Oftentimes, finishing a game is brutal. The last several months of production is difficult. You work everyday, nobody ever goes home. There is a bonding component. It takes really strong teams that work well together and care about one another. That comes through in those games.

That makes a lot of sense. You had all of these various creative types that you were working with — did they inspire various aspects of the game in new ways. Artists, musicians? Did those individuals inspire decisions [even] in those sports games?

Yeah, of course! I was fortunate to work at VC for about four years, now 2K games. During that time they were really growing - the team that was hired there. They had a keen eye on who they wanted to bring in and identify the right talent. We had our own in-house studio led by a super creative producer who was good with not only voice-over narration but also music composition and execution. We did all of that stuff in-house.

We had teams of animators and artists, all done internally. We had a motion capture studio so that we could do mocap whenever we needed to do mocap. If somebody had a crazy idea that we wanted to put in the game, we could bring in talent and get the motion capture. VC had the vision to bring all of that in-house and take advantage of that. The guys that ran that team, were very technically capable and committed to capturing animation much more direct from the motions to in-game. The engineering team had incredibly bright people who could have done many other things in software engineering but wanted to make games.

I learned that the 2K sports games were created because EA Sports did not want to share the genre on the Dreamcast. EA Sports wanted exclusivity to some extent and the decision was to “make our own line.” Was that part of the motivation — to compete with EA Sports?

SEGA Sports had existed as a brand for a while and competed with EA Sports. 2K sports is complicated. NFL 2K versus Madden and NBA 2K versus NBA Live. And World Series Baseball versus Triple Play and High Heat Baseball. In an effort to dominate the market, 2K games dropped the price of their sports titles from $59.99 and $19.99. It irritated EA. At that time you started having exclusive licenses. The leagues were gobbled up by single publishers. Previously the leagues would be perfectly happy to have multiple publishers because they would have revenue coming from multiple sources, direct fees and royalties. Two or three high quality products competing with one another did not matter to them. They win either way.

EA [Sports], through annoyance with 2K for undercutting them so drastically on price, gave the NFL and NFLPA giant minimum guarantees. They basically bought out the market. In response to that, 2K bought out the market to basketball. Sony bought out the market on baseball. Hockey might have stuck around but it may have even gone exclusive for a while. Within that period of time, too, college football had to disappear for player usage rights and fees and things like that. That was to me, when competition left the market. Companies did not have to compete anymore. It was not as if they did not care about the quality of the game or their gamers, but there was not a sense of one-upmanship coming from the publishing world.

For me, that was when I left sports games and got into other stuff.

***

What brought me to David was my interest in writing about a game with little to no recognition- the arcade version of World Series ’99. The arcade baseballer, per the interview, was developed in Japan as Super Dynamite Baseball ’99 and ported to the U.S. market under the World Series Baseball SEGA Sports name. And it is a game that was three to four years ahead graphically. Further, World Series Baseball ’99 is the basis for the port of the first baseball game on the Dreamcast - WSB 2K1.

Credit: SEGA Retro

WSB 2K1 on the Dreamcast was not the most well-received game due to the lack of fielding controls — and I tend to agree but only because the game feels unfinished. The original arcade game that it is based on is a better representation of what the Dreamcast game should have been. And both versions, arcade and Dreamcast port, had excellent presentation, camera work, and baseball physics. Nonetheless, as David mentioned, he was tasked with rebuilding the game with a company named Blue Shift for WBS 2K2. I remember being disappointed in 2K2. It was a huge departure from a game in WSB 2K1 that I found to have immense potential. But I will say: the WBS 2K2 engine that David supported would go on to later become MLB 2K7, one of my favorite baseball games of all-time. MLB 2K7 on the Xbox 360, in my opinion, had it all.

Going back to the relationship between SEGA of Japan and SEGA of America, several stories have recounted contentious executive management decisions between the offices about which chipsets and hardware the Dreamcast should include in its design. Conversely, David describes a more collaborative approach between the creatives from the two offices. David recounts how technology was shared during the Dreamcast era. This is a point I’d like to explore further through interviews with teams from SEGA of Japan and SEGA of America from that time period — a story for another day.