Celebrating 26 Years of Sega’s NAOMI

9/9/99 is the iconic date that most Sega fans celebrate when it comes to Sega gaming hardware, as that was the day when the company would launch their last grasp at a home console, the Dreamcast, in North America. But the Dreamcast wouldn’t exist in the same way without its arcade counterpart, the Sega NAOMI – which just so happened to officially launch on the less memorable date of 9/17/1998.

While that console just celebrated 25 years of existence and got a bit of media attention off the back of it, for all its significance to the story, the NAOMI has had less… so, this is where we come in (it’s a not so significant anniversary, but still). Let’s reminisce a little, and share some interesting inside information we have been given from someone who was there at Sega when the platform originally launched.

The Sega NAOMI

The launch of the Sega NAOMI was slightly more subdued compared to Sega’s full court worldwide press that they would give the Dreamcast a year later in North America, although that is to be expected when it comes to an arcade board versus a home console. Word had got out about it unofficially as early as February 1998, but the system was first demonstrated at the 1998 JAMMA show in Japan on September 17th, where it “hogged most of the limelight” thanks to the new game announcements that accompanied it: The House of the Dead 2, Zombie Revenge (then titled Blood Bullet), and Dynamite Baseball ’98. Zombie Revenge wouldn’t hit arcades until 1999, so HOTD 2 was essentially the “pack-in” launch title.

The above photo and information comes from the long-running Japanese arcade industry trade paper Game Machine, which was one of the sources that first leaked word out about the board back in February 1998. According to them NAOMI was originally just a codename, so if true, Sega evidently couldn’t think of another title. One other thing that they caught early wind of was how Sega unusually approached many other companies (more on them below) to develop licenced games for it. They had done that before around the time of the Model 2 and Saturn-based Sega Titan Video (ST-V), but only on a much more selective basis. Thanks to Sega expanding their developer pool outward though, the NAOMI was more like the NEO GEO MVS by SNK – just with a cartridge or GD-ROM slot instead of the 2/4/6s.

The NAOMI itself would sport the same hardware as the Dreamcast, although there were some enhancements that made straight and easy ports a little more difficult that just pressing Ctrl+C on the code. This primarily came with twice as much main & graphics RAM as the DC, then four times as much sound memory. NAOMI could also link up to 16 boards, sharing the processing load across units, as well as support games on cartridges and GD-ROMs. In the case of the latter, the machine would download the entire game into memory on startup, to reduce wear and tear on the GD-ROM unit itself (and prevent the issues that can happen from a disc spinning while the arcade machine is being played).

Alongside there being a universal stand-up NAOMI cabinet accompanying the board’s standard titles, different control panels were sometimes created to accommodate a different control scheme, such as the famous Monkey Ball banana joystick or OutRigger‘s more conventional one. A deluxe universal sit-down cabinet in the vein of Sega’s previous rear projection Megalo machines was also made.

There is a fantastic feature on the board in the third edition of the legendary Japanese arcade magazine Arcadia (where a few of the other photos in this post come from), and for some contemporary English coverage, the November 1998 issue of Sega Saturn Magazine (UK) had a good spread on the JAMMA launch, which you can read here. It also has a section on new Model 3 games, which is the platform that the NAOMI replaced. It should be noted though that this is the likely source for the erroneous claim that the JAMMA show and NAOMI launch had taken place in November 1998, the same month as the Dreamcast’s release in Japan – information from there in Western game magazines was often delayed or mangled.

Where Did NAOMI Come From? One Sega Employee’s Story

When you look up the NAOMI, you’ll usually see that it is an acronym for “New Arcade Operation Machine Idea”. While that isn’t wrong, there is slightly more to the story.

We are pleased to present this recollection of the NAOMI’s release and naming from long-time friend of the site Shinichi Ogasawara, aka Oga-Shi. We’ve heard from him a few times on AH this year, and most of you should know him best as the producer, director and senior game designer behind scores of great arcade releases, including Gunblade N.Y., The Lost World: Jurassic Park, Let’s Go Jungle!, and many others up to the present day with Sega Amusements.

For the NAOMI, he developed the lesser-known Jambo! Safari, Virtua Athlete, and Maze of the Kings. Here, he helps us understand where the system’s name likely came from:

Dear Arcade Heroes readers, as we celebrate the 26th anniversary of NAOMI, I would like to share some insights about its name. There has been much debate among gaming enthusiasts about whether NAOMI or Dreamcast came first and the origin of the name.

I was part of AM3 at the time, but the launch titles for the NAOMI came from AM1. Therefore, Oda-san, the team leader of House of the Dead, might have more accurate information about NAOMI’s launch than I do. Honestly, I am not fully certain of the true origin of the name NAOMI, but the commonly accepted explanation that Sega R&D division director Hisashi Suzuki (Hisa-san or Hisashi-san as we called him – there are too many Suzukis in Japan) named it seems credible to me.

This explanation involves Naomi Campbell’s then-present popularity in Japan, and Hisa-san’s influence among Sega Arcade R&D staff. At that time, the term “supermodel” was more prominent in Japan than individual names like Naomi Campbell. Japanese media also favored the term, and most Japanese men couldn’t distinguish between Cindy Crawford, Kate Moss, and Naomi Campbell. However, Naomi Campbell’s name was the easiest for Japanese people to remember because “Naomi” is a common Japanese name, and many mistakenly thought she was a Japanese fashion model.

Additionally, “Campbell” was familiar due to Campbell’s Soup, unlike “Crawford,” which contains the difficult “r” sound for Japanese speakers. For the average Japanese person, “supermodel” equated to Naomi Campbell. It was a convenient phrase that made them feel knowledgeable.

Although I didn’t interact with Mr. Hisashi Suzuki so much, I often heard stories from my superiors, like Oguchi-san (Derby Owners Club), Kumagai-san (Power Smash), and Watari-san (Virtual-On). Suzuki-san valued R&D ideas while being strict, and he often said that game titles should be easily understood by everyone. This was akin to asking young R&D guys to make titles that sounded old-fashioned.

Returning to the name NAOMI, I heard the rumor that it was derived from Naomi Campbell. None of the staff doubted this. The idea that “Uncle Hisashi-san” would choose a modern and easy-to-understand name inspired by a supermodel (implying a PCB model that surpasses previous ones) seemed very much like Suzuki-san. Only the person who named it can definitively say whether this is true or not. However, I am fond of this story linking Naomi Campbell to Sega’s NAOMI. – Oga

That story has been mentioned by one or two sources before, but not to the same extent of this detail. And it helps corroborate things too – there is another claim that the name was based on a supposed employee of Sega of the same name at AM2, but both Oga’s recollection and others have more in their favor.

The Games

As for the Sega NAOMI’s games themselves, according to System16, I count 81 releases to cart. But then you had 66 more released on GD-ROM – and that’s not counting successor boards. I might even be off on that a little as there could be some I overlooked on other pages. The games were developed not only by Sega, but also by Capcom, Namco, and Taito, among others. This made it a bit of a unifying force for the Japanese amusement industry at the time, although an argument could be made that the excessive number of quick arcade ports to home and hardware parity to consoles would hurt Sega’s arcade sales over time.

In the same way that some Konami arcade games supported PlayStation memory cards with interplay for their home versions, Sega did also attempt to build more of a bridge between console and arcade – by crossing over support for the Dreamcast’s VMU (Visual Memory Unit) devices, allowing players to save data in dedicated NAOMI cabinet reader slots. That was almost an early foreshadowing of the Aime cards they now have in Japan, though disappointingly few titles had the chance to use this before the DC died.

But Sega did not just use the NAOMI in arcades. The late ’90s and early ’00s was still a busy time for them in terms of diversifying into different businesses – and although some would say this spending on other ventures was another source of problems, there are a lot of colorful side projects that the NAOMI was utilized in. Did you know Sega briefly had a stab at fish simulators? That all grew out of the older Joypolis attraction Aquarena, before being updated to use the NAOMI and Dreamcast hardware on Fish Life.

This was then used as a base for the company’s own oddly-named “underwater exploration restaurant”, ‘Fish “on” Chips’, and finally repurposed into some digital menus at actual Japanese restaurant chains like Kura Sushi (there are some funny stories from one or two Sega alumni about those failing from soy sauce frying the NAOMIs 😛). But that’s not all, as the hardware also went into things like disaster prevention simulators, short-lived net cafés, and even pachinko machines after the Sega/Sammy merger.

The amount of different software and purposes the Sega NAOMI was used for is consequently sometimes dizzying, but all those parts needed to go somewhere after the Dreamcast went belly up…

The Legacy

In terms of the legacy it left, the story did not end with the original Sega NAOMI board. Sega went on to develop several variations; there was first the Hikaru (likely titled after the Japanese singer Hikaru Utada on the same sequential name rule, Oga tells us above), a beefier variation with early use of “phong” polygon shading. Not many games were made for it though, as it mainly powered a select few obscure (but much-loved) titles, and was abandoned after only a few years due to it being harder to develop on. It didn’t help that many operators had problems with the boards themselves, with chips often infamously falling off.

In its place came the NAOMI 2, which though slightly less powerful, lasted a lot longer and was adopted by other companies again. Then on the lower-range side was the System SP (falsely known as the “Aurora” by some unofficial sources), which was used for less graphically demanding games, and was still being supported right into the late 2000s. Sammy’s Atomiswave also shared some similarities in hardware too.

Together, all of these stand with the NAOMI proper as the last original arcade boards developed by Sega. That family of hardware would be succeeded by the Chihiro and Triforce, based on the existing Xbox and GameCube, respectively. Then, the company would, like most by that time, simply build all their subsequent arcade game boards from standard off-the-shelf PC parts. In that respect, it and the Model 3 do represent the final throes in that tradition of companies like Sega designing original hardware for their arcade works, which went all the way back to the ’70s based on the efforts of engineers like Hideki Sato and Hiroshi Yagi.

There is a danger of getting too hung up on that period though. Sega did perhaps tip over into the uber-expensive with the M3, no matter how incredible those games looked, which is partly why the NAOMI happened. Sure, it was a slight shame that it brought them to where Namco already was, with their hardware largely being modelled on and equal to the PlayStation – but there is the argument that the high costs were becoming untenable for the industry by then. The NAOMI ultimately gave us many great games at a more cost-effective price than what came before, one of the best things an arcade board can achieve.

We hope you enjoyed reading this little look back on the history of the Sega NAOMI; thanks again to Oga-san for his account of its history, as well as Ted for providing some extra media and information here.

Which games powered by the Sega NAOMI are your favorites?