Sega Veterans Reveal How 1990s Crunch Culture Meant Sleeping at the Office in SEA

Veteran developers Toru Ohara, Takaharu Terada and Toru Yoshida from Sega have painted a vivid picture of crunch culture that defined game development in the 1990s and 2000s across Southeast Asia. They recalled how it was almost taken for granted that developers would sleep at the office, with every new Sega workplace fitted with nap rooms and showers to accommodate those long hours. At Haneda studios, these facilities remained in use up to around 2012.

Terada shared that even while working on titles like Hatsune Miku Project DIVA Arcade, he often only went home on weekends during intense development phases. Meanwhile Yoshida recalled entire teams pulling all-nighters during debugging cycles, especially in the Sega Saturn era. In many ways, work hours blurred with life and camaraderie flourished during those late nights. Ohara and Terada looked back fondly on occasions when gaming together sparked ideas and fostered community, making the office feel more like a club than a workplace.

That said, the toll of such expectations became impossible to ignore. Thankfully, attitudes began shifting significantly in the late 2010s, with major studios like Xbox and PlayStation publicly distancing themselves from the grind-heavy models of the past.

 origin automaton