By Overwork practices at the publisher Sega (celebrated for Sonic, Persona, and Yakuza) were once so routine that nearly every fresh Sega workspace came with “snooze pods and wash stalls,” three seasoned Phantasy Star and Sakura Wars creators have revealed.
Toru Ohara, Takaharu Terada and Toru Yoshida—veterans who spent decades at Sega—reflected on how the landscape has shifted since the ’90s and ’00s in a chat with 4Gamer, rendered into English by Automaton. A glaring contrast they highlighted: back then, staffers were “essentially camping at their desks.”
“In the nineties, each newly opened Sega site rolled out nap zones and shower stalls,” Yoshida noted. “Well into the 2000s, the twin Haneda sites still kept them, and folks kept clocking overnight stays. It was more or less assumed you’d crash at work.”
Terada recalls those rest areas lingering until around 2010—the final year he bunked in the office while wrapping Hatsune Miku Project DIVA Arcade—adding they “vanished for good near 2012, if my memory serves.”
“When a project had a razor-thin deadline, staying till sunrise was the sole route,” Terada continued, saying he’d sometimes head home only on Saturdays, while Yoshida remembered “entire squads” “burning the midnight oil through the bug-squash stretch” during the Sega Saturn era.
Yet the grind wasn’t always dreary. Ohara and Terada would squeeze in multiplayer sessions, which doubled as “team bonding and occasional brainstorming. Those late-night hangouts felt less like a job and more like a club, in a weird way.”
Crunch became a headline-grabbing topic in the late twenty-tens, prompting giants on both Xbox and PlayStation sides to swear off marathon overtime.
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