Toronto Thumbs

The CON/text
Plague Dogs, Paper Gods, and Game Blogs for Dialogue

Growing up with the intention of writing blighted me with a severe tunnel vision for many years.

Even while struggling against the traditional path, I subscribed to some part of it. The idea of furthering education, of developing a sense of voice and style, and of cultivating a self loathing to the question of what it was I planned to do with my life, all of this seemed necessary if I was going to create a great work of fiction.

Today’s minor dose of “Know Your Jamie” is where I detail that intention: I desired only to write fiction if there was a way to augment style and narrative to create a work that felt new, or at the very least presented new challenges. Which is a fancy way of saying, I certainly did not want to write the same story someone else wrote but with new character names.

And that’s a very hard thing to do. My best advice to the aspiring writer is to try to lean heavily on the slipstream. But since I’m not on the best-sellers list, feel free to ignore my advice altogether.

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The CON/text
Should We Miss Sega?

On March 16 2001, Sega Corporation Chairman Isao Okawa died of heart failure at a Tokyo hospital. Even for long-time gamers the name may not be familiar, but Okawa was the founder of CSK, the conglomerate that bought Sega in 1984 while the gaming industry sought to emerge from the American video game crash. Okawa was deeply committed to the success of Sega, the Dreamcast console becoming his personal crusade in the then-battle to take back market dominance from Sony’s Playstation. The massive finances Sega required to launch the Dreamcast not only came from CSK, but also nearly half came from Okawa himself. Even after the demise of the Dreamcast and during Sega’s switch from console manufacturer to third party developer, Okawa donated shares of the company back to Sega to help create the cushion for the transition.

Though the primary concern for men of business is exponential growth, under Okawa’s leadership Sega became, and remains in many gamers minds the most striking example of a company committed to the risks of innovation. The consensus today is that this very spirit of creativity is what would ultimately stretch the company too thin and cause later disasters, and yet for all the market failures there were just as many memorable successes. Sega was a company always moving toward the future at a heightened pace, with innovation seen as the key to overcoming their competition. The true lament of his death is the loss of a figure that could hold a company together through such upheaval while maintaining creativity in an industry where management teams threaten to outnumber designers and artists.

Following Okawa’s death, CSK quickly sought to sell Sega, romancing companies such as Namco, Bandai, Electronic Arts, and Microsoft. But it was Sammy Corp that purchased the majority shares, allowing Hajime Satomi to become CEO of the new Sega-Sammy Holdings in October of 2004. And that event led to the subsequent reorganization of the company that helped destroy one of the most creative environments the game industry has ever known.

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