Segagaga

The year is 2025. Sega only has 3% of the market share left. The other 97% of the video game market is taken up by DOGMA. As the last stand against DOMGA's threat of a total monopoly, SEGA launches Project Segagaga as a last ditch effort: find somebody on the street who will be able to reclaim SEGA's lost territory in the market and bring proper competition back to the industry. One of these people is a teenager appropriately named Taro Sega.

Released for the Dreamcast when SEGA pretty much stopped caring about what it wanted to put out, Segagaga is a parody of the brief and rather one-sided rivalry between the Dreamcast and the PlayStation 2. While it's, at its core, a game company simulator, everything else about it is wacky and zany. Your grunt-level programmers resemble Moai statues and fuzzy monsters, the characters are real and do double-duty acting in the games and working for the company (with a few exceptions), and every game that SEGA under Taro's leadership develops and publishes pokes fun at some other game on the market, such as Dalai Lama.

As the game goes on, DOGMA recognizes SEGA as a financial threat, eventually taking the battle into space. That's the sort of game this is.


 * All Men Are Perverts: Taro can use pictures of pretty girls to manipulate his development teams.
 * Benevolent Boss: Taro.
 * Defeat Means Friendship: Taro has to physically fight each staff member in a turn-based Role-Playing Game style before he can recruit him or her.
 * Exposition Fairy: Alisa.
 * Hannibal Lecture: Taro's greatest talent. He makes frequent use of them to get the staff members back to work when they become feral.
 * Involuntary Transformation: The reason why the programmers look so strange is because the high stress of making a game causes them to mutate into bizarre creatures.
 * Last Stand: SEGA is the only company in the game business that DOGMA hasn't eliminated. A conversation with Alex Kidd shows that Nintendo existed in this world; DOGMA has wiped it out too.
 * Most Game Developers Are Male: All of the programmers, designers and directors seem to be male.
 * Multiple Endings: They're determined by how much money you've made for SEGA by the end of the game.
 * Pointy-Haired Boss: Taro at first, due to the nature of the Segagaga Project.
 * Recruit Teenagers with Attitude: How the main character gets involved. How this was supposed to save Sega, nobody knows.
 * Scrap Heap Hero: Alex Kidd was once the head spokesman for SEGA. Then Sonic the Hedgehog happened, and he was promptly laid off. Alex Kidd now works behind the counter at a convenience store.
 * Simulation Game: The core of the gameplay, though it borrows from some other genres.
 * Time Marches On: SEGA lost that 3% of the market share of game consoles not long after this game came out, let alone in 2025. On the other hand, SEGA now has a share of game software market much greater than 3%, which is the focus of the game. One can only wait and see how SEGA will do in 2025, assuming it survives until then.
 * Tron Lines: The interiors of SEGA Tower contains these.
 * Unexpected Gameplay Change: The game becomes a Shmup when DOGMA goes all-out against SEGA. In addition to how the game constantly shifts between an RPG and a simulation game.
 * Video Game Cruelty Potential: One can deny their overworked employees vacation.