“It was very strange, where even though he was part of Sega, the president of Sega would not know what was working on at that time,” he says. “It was sort of irregular and a top-secret type of operation that was going on,” Nagoshi says.
The AM2 office even needed a special key to enter. Nagoshi says the team was isolated from the rest of Sega, physically at a distance from its headquarters. In the ’90s, Suzuki was not only a big deal in the game industry, he was a big deal at Sega – which perhaps afforded him and his team special treatment within the company. On the other hand, he racked up an impressive portfolio, working as a designer on Virtua Racing, directing Daytona USA, and even working on Suzuki’s over-budget magnum opus, Shenmue, the most expensive game ever made at the time. Having no formal background in game development and working with Suzuki, Nagoshi says his early years at Sega in the ‘90s came with a steep learning curve.
Nagoshi wasn’t turned down, but in fact was hired to Sega AM 2, a development team within Sega known in the ‘90s for its arcade and fighting games, headed up by legendary developer Yu Suzuki. He applied anyway, “For kicks,” as he puts it.
At the time, he says he knew Sega was a big company, and he thought there was no way he’d ever be brought onboard.
Looking unsuccessfully for a job in movie production, Nagoshi says he came across an opening at Sega. His timing wasn’t great, though, as the Japanese film industry wasn’t exactly a lucrative business. In the 1980s, Nagoshi moved to Tokyo to study movie production in college. Virtua Racing, one of the first games Nagoshi worked on at Sega Even though the money caused strains in the relationship, I’m 100-percent at peace with it now.” “They would really proudly tell the townspeople about me. “But I did hear later on from the people of the town that my parents, when they saw that I had an interview published in a magazine or saw me in the media, they would take my picture around,” Nagoshi says. Unfortunately, however, he says by the time he was able to do this both his mother and father had dementia, to the point they were unable to recognize his actions or appreciate what he had done. Later in life, after working his way up within the game industry, Nagoshi returned to Yamaguchi to pay off his parents’ debt. “So, just being young and having a strong desire to get out and make a life for myself was one of the reasons that I went to Tokyo.” “Just to be honest, I grew up in a poor household and watching my parents, I kind of figured that staying here and following in their footsteps wouldn’t necessarily lead to a happy life for myself,” Nagoshi says through a translator. He didn’t want his parents’ lives either. After graduating high school, as the people he grew up with began getting jobs in their hometown, Nagoshi realized he didn’t want to live a similar life. He did, however, have one dream: He had seen Tokyo on TV, and something about city life appealed to him. Nagoshi says his younger life lacked direction, and that he didn’t really have aspirations for himself in Yamaguchi. Despite saying he recognizes that what he went through with his family was a necessary learning experience that got him to where he is today, he has a lot of complicated feelings about the household he grew up in. Nagoshi came from a poor household, his parents victims of sizable debt, and his father in particular had a gambling problem. When you talk to him about his early life, he doesn’t have a lot of positives to share. Nagoshi grew up in the small, rural prefecture of Yamaguchi. But it all starts far away from where he’s sitting right now in Tokyo. It’s a story that encompasses childhood trauma, Yu Suzuki, and drunken meetings that turned into one of the biggest cult franchises in video game history. Coy yet honest, reserved and flashy all at once, somehow, he fits his 30 years of game-development history into an hour-long Zoom call. He’s seven minutes late after a smoke break, wearing a $2,700 Louis Vuitton jacket.
Toshihiro Nagoshi knows how to make an entrance. We caught up with Nagoshi to learn more about his life, career, and why he thinks Sega should’ve fired him. These days, he’s most well known for his work on the Yakuza series. Toshihiro Nagoshi has worked on some of the most influential games of all time, including Virtua Fighter and Shenmue.