3D Gunstar Heroes devs on why it was chosen to be ported

SEGA has been up a translated interview about 3D Gunstar Heroes on its blog today. Producer Yosuke Okunari and M2 president Naoki Horii were interviewed.

During one part of the discussion, the two developers commented on why Gunstar Heroes was chosen to be one of the ports:

Yosuke Okunari: When we first began work on the SEGA 3D Remaster Project, we decided to go with a few arcade titles and a few Mega Drive titles. We believed that if we are able to perfectly emulate the console itself, similar to how we worked on the Virtual Console, we wouldn’t run into as many architectural problems and thus development would proceed according to schedule. Out of the eight titles during the first batch, five of the games were Mega Drive titles and the other three were from the arcade. The intention was to ensure we could actually develop (the much harder) three arcade titles. You see, we made the overall schedule easier to manage by buffering things with the Mega Drive games. Since arcade games tend to vary from game to game in the way they interact with the hardware, by adding these predictable Mega Drive games in, we could better handle delays caused by unforeseen issues on the arcade games. I mentioned this in a previous interview as well, but the reason why we picked the titles that have previously been ported to PS2 or Wii was also to mitigate any unexpected issues. But even taking that into consideration, just having these Mega Drive games in the lineup really helped lock in the schedule. That’s why we had those five titles originally. Since we successfully released the ports for the arcade titles during the first batch, we had a better idea of what the schedule would be for subsequent titles, and that gave us lee-way to work on titles we’d never touched before for the second batch, like Out Run. And now here we are releasing three new games for the second batch, games we decided to pass on the first time around for reasons other than hardware. These are titles that M2 actually refused to develop at the time.

Naoki Horii: We discussed in our previous article about 3D Streets of Rage 2 as to whether or not we would actually be able to get the backgrounds into 3D or now, and one might expect, there were those who said that Gunstar Heroes’ backgrounds wouldn’t be convertible anyway, so it was removed from the list of porting candidates. For example, the background on the 4th stage is not a true isometric projection, but rather it’s just a simple 45 degree angle line going into the screen, and thus is difficult to put into true stereoscopic 3D.

Okunari and Horii also spoke about Gunstar Heroes’ popularity, which is one reason why it was selected.

YO: Gunstar Heroes has been ported to a variety of game systems to date. The number of times this game has been ported is testament to its popularity, and as far as priorities go, this game was on the top of the list and would have been in the first batch.

NH: Oh yes, absolutely.

YO: It’s just the process of converting a game into stereoscopic 3D is a step above normal porting. Originally, this project stemmed from wanting to make a Mega Drive Virtual Console, but these days just a straight port doesn’t really capture the attention of the 3DS audience. I mean, it’s been a rough time for the Game Gear Virtual Console games [on 3DS], you know. And so Gunstar Heroes was regrettable not chosen for a 3D conversion in the first batch.

Be sure to give the full interview a look here.