On April 21, 2000, Sega split its internal development teams into ten semi-autonomous companies. Amid escalating financial losses from the Dreamcast console's struggles, the company restructured to give its top designers direct control — and direct responsibility — for their studios. Each studio would manage its own budget. Each would rise or fall on what it made. Hisao Oguchi, who had managed AM3 since 1993, now had to name his new company. He chose Hitmaker. He said it was 'the perfect translation of our image.'
Oguchi had joined Sega in 1984, the year before the Mark III console launched in Japan. He worked his way through Sega's R&D structure, and when AM3 opened in April 1993, he became its manager. His approach was different from AM2, led by Yu Suzuki, which pursued technical perfection. Oguchi called AM3's environment 'like a university laboratory.' He did not specialize in a single genre. His primary objective, he said, was to create games that 'look interesting' — games you would not find on a home console.
AM3 made racing games, sports games, mecha combat games, and novelty titles. Star Wars Arcade (1993). Jurassic Park (1994). Sega Rally Championship (1995), which became a breakout Japanese arcade hit. Virtual On: Cyber Troopers (1996), which used a twin-stick controller no one else had attempted. Top Skater (1997). And in 1999, Crazy Taxi — directed by Kenji Kanno, who had been at Sega since 1993 without much recognition until then. Crazy Taxi prioritized the feel of motion over the simulation of driving. It was fast, sensory, and illegal. It sold very well.
In 1999, Oguchi's pet project Derby Owners Club was released. It was a horse raising and racing game, and it was the first arcade game to save player statistics on an IC card that could be put into any machine. The card let players carry their progress from one arcade to another. That progression — across time, across geography — was not a technical feature. It was social. Derby Owners Club became the first of many large-scale social arcade games that would be very successful for Sega. Later, World Club Champion Football would extend the concept with flat panel card readers and a library of cards for football players, adding the dimension of trading. Hitmaker originated the entire genre of card-based arcade games in Japan.
When the ten studios launched on April 21, 2000, each was given approximately 120 employees and a mandate to operate as an independent business. Hitmaker had 124 people, primarily from AM3's existing team. The studio was one of the few that turned a profit. That gave Oguchi leverage. He invested beyond video games — into darts, into other entertainment businesses. He was building not just a studio, but a company.
But Sega itself was not building. The Dreamcast had failed. By 2001, Sega announced it would no longer manufacture hardware. The ten-studio experiment, which had been described as 'a brief moment of remarkable creativity,' was already unwinding. In 2003, Oguchi departed Hitmaker to become president of Sega — part of a broader consolidation plan. Before he left, Sega Rosso was merged into Hitmaker. The next year, on July 1, 2004, Hitmaker was reintegrated back into Sega along with the other studios. Its website shut down the same day. The company had lasted exactly four years.
The AM3 designation continued inside Sega until April 2009, when it was dissolved into other departments. But the work — Crazy Taxi, Virtual On, Derby Owners Club, World Club Champion Football — remained. Not as relics, but as originals. They had defined genres. They had created social structures around arcade play. They had made cards into vessels of identity. Hitmaker had been the perfect translation of an image — but the image had belonged to a moment that was already ending when the name was chosen.
The road you are on now, where the destination was defined by others years before you arrived — is it a constraint, or is it the trail left by someone who refused to stay inside the lines?