OK, the STI article from Retro Gamer (I was wrong, it's the latest issue, not the older one). It's six pages so I'm just going to give a very brief summary of interesting shiz.
SEGA TECHNICAL INSTITUTE
Sonic Team, AM2, Team Andromeda: these are the names that spring to mind when we think of Sega's greatest in-house development teams. Yet a comparably unknown development team was responsible for many of its best games of the nineties. Ashly Day lifts the lid on Sega's best kept secret.
Did you know that very few of the Sonic the Hedgehog games were actually developed in Japan? To many hardcore Sega fans it's common knowledge, but we're willing to bet that most people are still unaware of this. After all, the startup sequences to the games all feature the Sega logo with no clue to their true origin. The truth is that of all the Mega Drive's Sonic platformers, only the first was actually developed by the true Sonic Team. The rest were put together by the unique and fascinating Sega Technical Institute.
STI were really two seperate entities. The western side and the Japanese side. The American side of STI worked on titles like Sonic Spinball. While the Japanese side did Sonic 3 and Sonic and Knuckles, before Yuji Naka left STI and went back to Japan. The largely American staff STI now created games like Comix Zone and The Ooze. The Ooze never got an American release, and only a limited Japanese and Australian release. STI's final game was Die Hard Arcade. A co-production between STI and the Japanese based AM1 team.
Two further 3D games are also known to have been in the works, although neither was ever released. A sequel to Comix Zone was planned, which would have reworked the unique concept in 3D and presumably expanded the series into a franchise. More famously, the team was also involved in the troubled development of Sonic-X-Treme, which went through several redesigns at various stages of development before being put to rest.
The late start to 32-bit development and the difficulty of developing for the complex Saturn architecture didn't help STI to survive during this transitional period and, according to several sources, the company soon became a less pleasant place to work. "The company had a hard time making the transition from the Mega Drive platform to the 32-bit machines", explains Roger Hector. "Sega's Saturn had a lot of capabilities, but it was harder to develop on than the new PlayStation. Without tools or documentation available, Saturn games took longer to make, and fewer third-party developers supported the platform. When it became obvious that Sony was taking the lead, Sega's corporate personality changed. It became very political, with lots of finger-pointing around the company. Sega tried to get a handle on the situation, but they made a lot of mistakes and ultimately STI was swallowed up in the corporate turmoil. Our seperate protected status began to crumble. Virtually all of the senior management in America left. For me, it was no longer fun to work there, the magic was gone, and it became obvious it was time to leave. The new management did not have the same vision... So they eventually shut down STI."
Peter Morawiec, designer of Comix Zone, shares similar sentiments, "Sega was in rapid decline at that time and things were pretty chaotic. We (Morawiec and Stephens) stuck it out until late 1996 at which point we left to form Luxoflux."
Quietly, with little fanfare, the STI was shut down somewhere around 1996/97 as Sega shifted focus back to its internal studios. Few gamers mourned its passing, although few realised it even existed to begin with. Only Comix Zone and The Ooze ever bore the STI logo, and just one of those ever saw a US release. Nevertheless, the ex-STI employees Retro Gamer has spoken to all look back fondly at their time at the institute. "It was a strange period of my life", recalls Stephens. "Peter and I would work very odd hours at times - going home at four in the morning was not unusual, and all-nighters were pretty frequent. There was a stong sense of camaraderie amongst the core team that has persisted to this day. I look back on those days fondly, but i'd never want to do it again." Morawiec agrees: "STI was a fun place to be at back then, full of colourful characters. The sales of the Genesis were booming and Sega of America was growing very rapidly. There were ups and downs, but overall I have very fond memories of the team and my five years with STI."
Retro Gamer was recently lucky enough to meet Yojiro Ogawa, the designer of Sonic and the Secret Rings, who happily spoke about his favourite Mega Drive games, both of which were developed by the STI. One favourite, Sonic 2, is of particular importance as its special stages, where Sonic and Tails run headlong into the screen, bear a striking resemblance to the way Secret Rings plays. Ogawa also explained that he personally made sure that Comix Zone was included on the Sonic Mega Collection, as it was a game he liked very much. The connection betwen the two? Comix Zone was designed by Peter Morawiec - the same man who had drawn the special stages in Sonic 2. Even a decade after its demise it seems that the Sega Technical Institute continues to have a profound effect on the development of Sonic.