Also a stealth documentary on young white people fashion in the 90s
May 20, 2016 6:28 AM   Subscribe

It's 1996 and you've been hired as a game tester by Sega's Test Department. How will you get acquainted with the corporate culture? Lucky for you, Sega has commissioned a "trainumentary": This is SEGA TEST
posted by Pope Guilty (20 comments total) 31 users marked this as a favorite
 
The ultimate radicalawyer clickbait: a "where are they now" listicle about these employees.
posted by radicalawyer at 6:33 AM on May 20, 2016 [1 favorite]


I'm still trying to figure out how/shy this exists. Sega paid for it? And commissioned a logo with Iron Maiden-style S's? And the first three minutes are just shots of them making coffee? And then it's a bunch of people talking about how much they hate playing the same thing over and over again, and telling you that they work 60+ hours a week? And all the people they interview look absolutely miserable?

Current favorite part: the guy talking about how Sega is "a real melting pot" because the sales and marketing and tech guys all work together... and the camera pans over room after room full of middle-aged white guys. (And some 19-year-old proto-dude-bros wearing varsity letter jackets)
posted by Mayor West at 6:57 AM on May 20, 2016 [4 favorites]


My favorite is the guy who put in 188 hours in two weeks on Eternal Champions, which no amount of testing could save.
posted by Pope Guilty at 7:02 AM on May 20, 2016 [5 favorites]


In 2003 I had, reluctantly, accepted a job offer to work as a tester at the Konami offices in Burlingame. The interview was one of the most surreal and depressing of my life - I had to sing "Complicated" into a pre-Rock-Band singing game and then listen to all of the employees grumble about the pending move to the basement, Milton-style.

Thankfully right before I was supposed to start - and quite unexpectedly - I got an offer from a bank to do software development. I am forever grateful for that twist of fate.
posted by grumpybear69 at 7:02 AM on May 20, 2016


One minute in and already references to Spinal Tap and All That Jazz? Genius!
posted by Ben Trismegistus at 7:03 AM on May 20, 2016


.....I think my work has the same coffee machines.
posted by quaking fajita at 7:41 AM on May 20, 2016


The interview was one of the most surreal and depressing of my life - I had to sing "Complicated" into a pre-Rock-Band singing game

Based on the ratio of work ability to karaoke enthusiasm at my job when I got here, I think we might have used that interview technique in the mid-00s.
posted by Bulgaroktonos at 7:51 AM on May 20, 2016


Absolutely adorable; there's a section around 20:00 where the blond surfer tester bro talks about how finding a bug just before release means the whole release is now held up and the game might be delayed because testing somehow missed this one final bug. Ha ha ha ha ha.
posted by Nelson at 7:57 AM on May 20, 2016 [3 favorites]


Well - male fashion. Though it was tricky to avoid double-counting people, conservatively, I counted 34 men and 3 women in the entire video. 30 men had appeared onscreen before the first woman appeared.

Also, the production values made it look 10 or 20 years older than it actually is. Like a home video project.
posted by Miko at 8:07 AM on May 20, 2016 [1 favorite]


Mr. Dave Dodge has the dreamiest hair in this video. Peak dreamboat hair for my 1995 self. *swoons* And the soundtrack is faboo! Spoonman? Pearl Jam?

Around 18:00, they remake testing cartridges - this is my favorite part! WOW! Nekkid game cartridges! Loading up the code on individual chips!

And gratuitous footage of the vending machines, complete with the too-wrinkly dollar bill needing to be smoothed out. Jolt soda, cigarettes, and chips - breakfast of testers!

I loved how the PICO (kids platform) tester said how bored he was and then the footage of him testing it just proved how fucking bored he was. At least he got to kick it around and drop it on the floor?
posted by jillithd at 8:26 AM on May 20, 2016 [1 favorite]


It's 7am, time for the morning shift to start, and the A-Team is ALREADY IN THE OFFICE?
posted by hanov3r at 8:28 AM on May 20, 2016


Kinda flabbergasted by the guy at 11:15 apparently reading the Chicago Daily News on a Game Gear...does anybody have a clue what this is?

Anybody else get kind of Romney vibes from the CEO?
posted by zchyrs at 8:34 AM on May 20, 2016 [1 favorite]


I got the feeling they were aiming for the 10-20 year old home video project feel. The title screen was a Spinal Tap clone and the cameras seemed to be deliberately shaky/obvious. I assume 'Trainumentary' is a play on the Rockumentary and/or Mockumentary.

I had a bit of a 'Bart at the Mad Magazine offices' moment because they're making and playing games all day and their office is more stuffy and cubicle filled than mine and I'm in a stuffy, cubicle filled government office. I know now that this makes sense, but I'm glad I didn't see this as a kid. My dreams would have been prematurely crushed.

This was a great watch for many reasons. Thanks for posting.
posted by Clinging to the Wreckage at 8:34 AM on May 20, 2016


Absolutely adorable; there's a section around 20:00 where the blond surfer tester bro talks about how finding a bug just before release means the whole release is now held up and the game might be delayed because testing somehow missed this one final bug. Ha ha ha ha ha.

And nowawadays they'd just patch it in the DLC and not release a separate patch for the basegame.
posted by nathan_teske at 8:58 AM on May 20, 2016


Loooooove the Black Crowes background music halfway through.
posted by Bob Regular at 9:10 AM on May 20, 2016 [1 favorite]


The music cues and interstitial title cards make me think of Clerks.
posted by Pope Guilty at 9:53 AM on May 20, 2016 [1 favorite]


Absolutely adorable; there's a section around 20:00 where the blond surfer tester bro talks about how finding a bug just before release means the whole release is now held up and the game might be delayed because testing somehow missed this one final bug. Ha ha ha ha ha.

The bug in question seems to have prevented you from entering the playoffs in a baseball game. That's less of a glitch and more of a class-action suit waiting to happen.

Unless you're playing as the Astros. Then it's a feature intended to prevent the End of Days.
posted by dances with hamsters at 11:16 AM on May 20, 2016 [1 favorite]


The ultimate radicalawyer clickbait: a "where are they now" listicle about these employees.

Someone on the neogaf forum did some research.
Joel Breton, "Lead Tester" who always looked like he just got back from surfing, has his own impressive Wikipedia page, worked at Bethesda, apparently setting up their Russian dev studio, did some casual games, then joined Take-Two and produced some sports games, went to Hudson and produced Bomberman Live, Bonk's Adventure, Diner Dash. He's apparently now a professor of social game design at The Games Academy in SF.
posted by jjwiseman at 12:00 PM on May 20, 2016 [5 favorites]


"Also a stealth documentary on young white people fashion in the 90s"

I feel like I saw a different video. Plenty of folks in that video didn't look white to me. I only mention it because I imagine were I a person of color and watched that video and read that title, I'd feel a bit invisible. As someone who worked in tech in the mid 90s, I'd have been pretty happy to have worked in such a relatively diverse environment.
posted by funkiwan at 2:03 PM on May 20, 2016 [1 favorite]


I was at SEGA test during this era (I have 2 non-speaking parts in the video). I can't speak to the intent of the video (I assume training), and I don't even remember the filming, but I can fill in some details.

The tendency of the video to present the work as difficult is an antidote to the almost universal idea that a games tester just plays games all day. I can tell you that you might love it the first 100 times people exclaim how cool your job is, but after that you start to want to let people know that it's still work. The video sort of gets to the work (heavy analysis, lots of hours, plenty of repetition) later.

About diversity, the department was something of a melting pot, if the video wasn't. There were about 60 regulars and between 10 and 80 temps at any given time, and I recall a good ratio of people of most ethnicities being there and it being pretty egalitarian (given the era and the context) - certainly more so than the rest of the company. The manager and his assistants were generally white dudes, but the game lead/assistant lead positions were pretty rainbow.

Women, on the other hand, were not handled well. There were few women, and while many people worked with them as with anybody else, the best a lot of others could do was ignore them, and there was a lot of inappropriate attention paid to the few women, and the total environment was quite sexist in an ignorant way. Like Mad Men, with, as has been noted, far shittier fashion sense.

My three years at SEGA (and her daughter company, Segasoft, a precursor to the wild world of internet gaming today) were a formative experience for me, and I still count about 10 people from SEGA in my core group of friends today. In fact, I'm arranging a lunch with three of them for next week.

Oh, and the Chicago Daily News on the GameGear screen is from a game called "Chicago Syndicate", an Eternal Champions spinoff. I think I can still recite the Eternal Champions intro from memory.
posted by superdne at 2:52 PM on May 20, 2016 [11 favorites]


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