Makoto Uchida: The History of a Sega Legend

Makoto Uchida is a legendary game designer and producer for Sega, with hits that include Altered Beast, Golden Axe, Alien Storm, and Die Hard Arcade. His nearly 40 year career is as impressive as most gaming legends, but he often doesn’t get the same kind of love that others do. This post is set to change that, as Makoto Uchida was one of the most influential game designers of all time, and deserves all the recognition in the world for helping fine-tune the beat ’em up genre.

Makoto Uchida’s Early Career

Uchida was an avid gamer when he started his career in gaming. He joined Sega of Japan as a tester on the soon-to-be classic After Burner in 1987. After the game launched, he quickly rose through the ranks and soon found himself pitching his own game idea to Sega: a Greek mythology beat ’em up inspired by the transformations that he loved watching in Michael Jackson’s Thriller and the movie The Howling.

“I wanted to surprise everyone by creating an action game with flashy visuals that no one had ever seen, with specific emphasis on the characters and the environment,” said Uchida.¹

The game was Altered Beast.

Developing Altered Beast

Despite his young age an inexperience, Sega green-lit Uchida’s idea. The promise of grand visuals that would mimic the special effects in movies convinced them to take a chance on the young game designer. The only problem was that they didn’t have a development team to get started.

So Uchida waited…for 6 months.

Creating the Spectacle

But in that 6 months of time, Uchida didn’t wait around. He worked with Sega artists to get artwork completed for the game. A special emphasis was put on the transformations of the main character into different Beasts, ala Thriller and The Howling.

Uchida tasked his lead artist to work on the transformations, but Uchida didn’t like what the artist was doing, and instead wrote his own vision down on paper for the artist to then implement. The lead artist took exception to it and quit the project in protest.²

A new lead artist came aboard, and Uchida gave them one task: create the transformations. The transformations “were achieved by asking the game’s [new] lead artist to focus just on this for an entire month,” according to Uchida.¹

Gameplay Struggles

Finally, a development team within Sega’s original R&D department, R&D1, had a group of developers free up to work on Altered Beast. The small team had just come off of creating another Sega game, Shinobi. Dubbed Team Shinobi, they got to work trying to help Uchida achieve his vision, but despite the months of waiting and planning, Uchida struggled.

“I didn’t know how to create the fun in the gameplay and struggled a lot,”¹ Uchida remembered. So he leaned on Lead Programmer, Kenichi Hokari’s knowledge for how to create the gameplay. Hokari had worked on Fantasy Zone and Alex Kidd before joining the team and shared what he had learned with Uchida.

Uchida initially wanted the gameplay to rely on pressure-sensitive buttons, which would do different moves depending on how hard or light you pressed them. However, the technology was simply too expensive to include in arcade cabinets. Uchida tried another approach by making enemies stronger or weaker against specific attacks, but the gameplay then became too complex.

With time running out and patience running thin, the team pulled back on the bigger vision for the game to have ground-breaking gameplay and instead shipped it with scaled down game mechanics.

“Because of the [lack] of a pressure-sensitive sensor button, the number of character actions fell to half from the original concept and the complexity of the game was decreased by this,” he would later say. “As a result, players got tired of the game relatively soon.”¹

Altered Beast Launches as Makoto Uchida’s First Game

Altered Beast would hit arcades June 14, 1988. Uchida would go on to say, “I was so thrilled when I saw,
not only the players, but the people around the players uniformly surprised at the video arcade.”¹

The game’s launch in Japan was decent, but it was the US reception that really caught Sega by surprise. American arcades brought in twice as much revenue for Altered Beast compared to Japanese arcades in 1988. Unlike Japanese arcade players, Americans overlooked the poor gameplay and instead focused on the spectacle of the game.

But the lack of solid gameplay and struggles with getting the controls to feel just right bugged Uchida, and he vowed to fix it in his next game.

Golden Axe Development

Even before Altered Beast’s success, Sega had already asked Makoto Uchida and Team Shinobi (now part of AM1) to create a new beat ’em up that would be similar to Double Dragon, which featured 2.5D movement of players, so the beat ’em up didn’t play like a platformer on one plane, but rather the characters could move closer and away from the player.

Once again, Uchida would be inspired by movies from the West. His follow-up offering would be based on a combination of Conan the Barbarian, Double Dragon, and Dragon Quest. The game would be built on the same Sega System 16b platform that Altered Beast was, but with the new depth of motion and even more detailed characters and backgrounds, the team immediately faced technical challenges. The hardware simply couldn’t handle the chaos that Uchida wanted to throw at the player. The hardware could only handle six total “playable” characters (players + active enemies) on the screen at once.

While cinematic spectacles would still be featured in Golden Axe via the magic attacks, the game would have to rely more heavily on its own gameplay to succeed.

Designing Toward Depth

After the setbacks in the development of Altered Beast, Uchida and Team Shinobi focus squarely on the limitations they had. Instead of having the player make moves by pressing a plethora of buttons, which would complicate gameplay, they instead make the game engine change the attack based on the situation the player was in. Normal attacks at a distance would be basic, but attacking while close to an enemy would make the attacks change, sometimes smashing an enemy on the head or even picking them up and throwing them.

The other novelty in the gameplay that Uchida introduced was perpetual weapons. Unlike Double Dragon, where you could find a weapon and use it for a short time, in Golden Axe your character would always wield a weapon.

“Now, if we want the character to permanently hold a weapon in a side-view game while maintaining the size of the character, the character will have an enormous reach and will become too strong,”³ Uchida explained. “We adjusted the swing so the characters could not attack too far. We had to draw the playable character small, but instead we made the boss enemies and magic [effects] huge…”

Uchida Leaves Nothing to Chance

Uchida and Team Shinobi didn’t guess what would work. They tested it.

They got 100 different Sega employees to play early versions of the game and give their feedback so the team could iterate the gameplay. Uchida himself would stand behind each player as they played and record the playthrough, noting issues and frustrations as they came up.

Golden Axe Name Controversy

Golden Axe was originally developed under the title Battle Axe. However, the team couldn’t secure the rights to the name and instead changed it to Broad Axe.

But then, Sega Enterprise President, Tom Petit, saw the game and liked that the dwarf had an axe that looked like gold. He made the suggestion to change the name of the game to Golden Axe. Uchida and Team Shinobi didn’t like it, but Petit put his thumb on the scale and told them he would not sell the game if the title was not Golden Axe.³ The team relented.

Uchida’s Smash Hit

On January 27, 1989, just over 6 months after the release of Altered Beast, Sega released Golden Axe to the world, and the world ate it up.

The result of putting gameplay first was the creation of an arcade smash hit. Golden Axe would become a top grossing arcade game in the US and also a top 20 arcade in Japan.

Act 3: Alien Storm

The success of Golden Axe didn’t slow down Uchida nor Team Shinobi, and they soon started work on what can be described as Golden Axe set in space.

Alien Storm had a similar art style to Golden Axe, and once again featured perpetual weapons, this time in the form of flame throwers, energy whip, and lightning gun, that players used to destroy aliens.

The game also mixed in some first person shooter sections similar to Operation Wolf and sprinting sections that played more like shmups than beat ’em ups. The variations in gameplay helped make Alien Storm another hit, though not to the same degree as Golden Axe. The game included many references to the previous two games as well, including a cameo from Gilius, the dwarf from Golden Axe.

Alien Storm was also special for Uchida and Team Shinobi, as it would be the last under that team’s name. It would simply be referred to as AM1 moving forward. Incredibly, Team Shinobi only created five games, and three of them weren’t Shinobi titles. All three of those non-Shinobi titles, were designed by Makoto Uchida.

Alien Storm launched in April of 1990 in North America and Japan in May of 1990.

As the team is in full swing creating Alien Storm, Uchida got an update that he didn’t expect. The upcoming launch of the Sega Mega Drive (rebranded as the Sega Genesis) in North America, was going to include Altered Beast as a bundled game when it launched in August 1989. This would take Uchida’s first game out of the arcades and bring it home to thousands, if not millions of people.

“When I heard that Altered Beast would be bundled with all the Sega Genesis packages in North America I had no idea what to expect.”¹

Uchida waited for Sega to make the same move with the Mega Drive in Japan, but the game never bundled with the Japanese version of the console.

Years later, he would finally get a chance to go to the United States. Upon going to a toy store to find a Genesis console with Altered Beast in it, he was met with another surprise. The Genesis was on the shelf, but the included game was a little blue hedgehog, not Altered Beast.

Uchida Takes a Quick Break from Beat ’em Ups

After Alien Storm, Uchida took a break from the beat ’em up genre and created Ribbit!, which was built on the Sega System C board and was very simple compared to his previous outings. It was basically a variation on the game Frogger, but the goal was to eat insects and not be eaten yourself. Ribbit! launched in Japan and the US in 1991.

The small and simple game was charming, but didn’t have the popular appeal of Uchida’s previous outings, which Sega was hot to capitalize on.

Golden Axe II Goes On Without Uchida

While Uchida worked on Ribbit!, Sega green lit Golden Axe II as a Sega Genesis/Mega Drive exclusive. However, instead of waiting for Uchida, Sega put AM1 designer Kazuma Fujii in charge of the project.

Golden Axe II launched at the end of 1991 and beginning of 1992 on the Sega Genesis, but fell short of its predecessor. Critics complained that it was too similar to the original and its difficultly was much easier. It lacked any true gameplay enhancements that made the original stand out.

Back in the Saddle

After the sub-par showing of Golden Axe II, Sega put Uchida back in the driver’s seat for a true arcade sequel to the original. This time, built on Sega’s updated System 32 arcade hardware, Uchida and AM1 got to work on their familiar IP.

Instead of giving the same characters a new adventure like the tepidly received Golden Axe II did, this entry into the series would introduce four new characters and a ton of new gameplay and combos.

Due to the more advanced hardware, the game could be larger, faster, and include far more characters on the screen at once. But instead of throwing everything at the player for just the spectacle of it, Uchida again focused on the gameplay. Now, players could actually team up on villains and do combined moves on a single enemy. And, this time around, all four characters could be played at the same time on a four-player cabinet.

The game also included a “choose your own adventure” style play, where players could decide which paths to take. Depending on the decision, it could result in players skipping entire sections of the game and allowing for multiple unique replays of the game.

Golden Axe: Return of Death Adder was released in arcades in July of 1992, and to this day is arguably the best Golden Axe game of all time.

Unfortunately, Golden Axe: Return of Death Adder came out right as Konami had hit its stride with arcade beat ’em ups. Konami’s X-Men arcade had launched just a few months prior and sported 2, 4, and 6 player cabinets. Konami also had hits with Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Turtles in Time in the years prior. While Uchida and AM1’s game was great, it was hard to compete against the X-Men and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles in the early 1990s.

From the Horse to the Skies

The beat ’em up genre was quickly becoming saturated in the early 1990’s, but a new technology was starting to make waves in arcades. Sega’s Model 1 arcade board and it’s flagship games, Virtua Fighter and Virtua Racing, were taking arcades by storm.

Uchida and AM1 once again took a break from the beat ’em up genre to try something new. Using the Model 1 board’s 3D technology, the team set out to create an arcade flight combat simulator. The game was unique in that it gave players the options of two different modes to play in: Dog Fight and Expert.⁶

With the new technology, Uchida and AM1 once again leaned in heavily on the spectacle of the game. The game was beautiful and vibrant with different aircraft to choose from and locations to play.

Wing War released in June of 1994, featuring simple cockpit controls and 4 different view buttons similar to Virtua Racing. While initially doing well in arcades, the game came nowhere close to the popularity of the team’s previous outings.

Wing War also was the last game Sega built on its Model 1 hardware, as it’s Model 2 hardware was already on full display in 1993 with Daytona USA.

Yippee Ki Yay, Makoto Uchida

In what was becoming a bit of a pattern, Uchida would do well with beat ’em ups, then try something outside of the genre, perform poorly, and then come back to the genre he knew best.

This time, a strange twist of fate brought him far from home, and to the country that inspired his earliest games and gave him his biggest successes. In February of 1996, Uchida and AM1 were moved across the Pacific to the United States to work with the Sega Technical Institute (STI), which had already created incredible hits including Kid Chameleon, Sonic the Hedgehog 2 and Comix Zone.⁸

When Uchida and AM1 arrived in California, they found an STI team that was full of talented artists, but no ideas for a game. Uchida was just the man to bring them the idea. They also had strict orders: create a game using Sega’s excess inventory of ST-V arcade boards. These boards would be less powerful than Sega’s Model 2 board, but more powerful than the Model 1 hardware used on Wing War.

Technical limitations had thwarted Uchida on Altered Beast, but now he and the AM1 team were seasoned veterans who knew how to work around technical limitations. Working within the confines of an under-powered board would present challenges, but Uchida knew what it took to make a great game: amazing gameplay.

A fan of the movie Die Hard, Uchida wanted to create a game based off of a similar concept – a cop moving through a building, beating up bad guys to save the day.

Die Hard Arcade (known as Dynamite Deka in Japan) became the next project, and it combined everything Uchida and AM1 had learned from their many previous beat ’em up titles. This game, now rendered in full 3D, would take their gameplay to the next level.

“After [Golden Axe], the world of 3D presentation opened up to us, and I thought that might be the key to breathing new life into the genre,”¹² Makoto Uchida would later say.

The goal in all of Uchida’s beat ’em ups was simple: make something feel like a movie, but control like a game.

Creating a playable action movie with cinematic camera angles, CD-quality audio, and transitions between scenes that play out like movies, but still require user interaction was the goal, and the team delivered on it. Die Hard Arcade featured over 50 moves a player could make, a toy chest of weapons that included pistols, fire axes, machine guns, anti-tank guns and spray cans, that when paired with a lighter created flame throwers. If you emptied a clip from a gun at an enemy, you’d throw the empty gun at them. The game was nuanced, cinematic, and above all: FUN.

Adding to the fun was fixing a glaring problem Uchida saw in beat ’em ups. “I thought: ‘The brawling is fine, but afterwards there are parts where you just slowly walk. Isn’t that a bit boring?’ I pondered that for a while and then, as I’ve mentioned before, thought it might be more interesting if you made the walking sequences more cinematic and in 3D,” Uchida told Sega Saturn magazine.⁸

Uchida added an action sequence between level transitions, called a Quick Time Event, where players had to quickly respond to a cue. Respond with the wrong button, and you’d fail and have to fight whatever enemy was on the screen. Succeed, and you’d knock the enemy down and continue to the next part of the level.

Uchida knew his target market would appreciate it.

“When we tried it I thought: ‘The Americans are going to love this too.'”⁸

Altered Beast taught Uchida and AM1 not to compromise controls. Die Hard Arcade reinvented and revitalized the genre.

When it launched in July of 1996, Die Hard Arcade became a hit, and the best selling American-made Sega arcade game in Japan up to that point. It would get a quick port to the Sega Saturn, as it was basically built on the Saturn’s hardware to begin with.

It was also the last game created by STI.

Dynamite Cop Development

The success of Die Hard Arcade warranted a sequel.

That sequel came in 1998, but Sega opted not to use the Die Hard license on it, and instead released it as Dynamite Cop in North America and Dynamite Deka 2 in Japan. Once again, Uchida and AM1 created a fast-paced beat ’em up, but unfortunately more emphasis in the game went to the many creative weapons (including slapping people with a fish) than in giving the game a ton of depth. At just three levels, the game is very short, especially when it came to the Dreamcast release, where people expected dozens of hours of game play and only got about an hour or two in total. Some critics praised the gameplay while others maligned the game’s short length and repetitive enemies.

The other issue the game faced was that its graphics looked like really good Sega Saturn graphics, not then top-of-the-line Model 2 and Dreamcast graphics.

That said, the game was very fun to play for the short time it took to complete. Just like its predecessor, there were amazing set pieces, great cinematics and solid gameplay that included an abundant move list.

Going Online for the First Time

Makoto Uchida had now been developing games for over a decade, and grew as the technology around him expanded from 2D sprites to 3D. He was also getting further and further into corporate culture as a senior member of AM1, which was now rebranded to Wow Entertainment. With that came additional responsibilities outside of the already demanding job of game design.

Makoto Uchida Gets Acclaim On Board

By this point, Sega had long ago hit its crescendo as the king of gaming with the Genesis, and with the flop of the Sega Saturn and now struggling Dreamcast sales, Sega was desperate to get more games that appealed to Americans. Uchida was given a directive to find more American developers to work with to help make more “American” games for Sega. He reached out to Acclaim’s arcade division, which was struggling and about to close down, to recruit talent. After Uchida spoke to Acclaim’s Art Director, Gerardo ‘Enzo’ Sprigg, they agreed to have the Acclaim team join Sega for a new game.⁹

A fan of Namco’s Tokyo Wars, a sit down tank simulator arcade game, Uchida wanted to make something similar that people would see in an arcade and immediately think they could play because the steering wheel and pedals seemed so familiar across racing games. If you knew how to play one, you could play them all. So the team began working on a tank game, similar to Tokyo Wars.

Alien Front Online Takes Shape

But when the Sega executives saw the initial prototype of the game, they loved that there were destructible environments, but thought it was too similar to the Namco counterpart. Uchida realized the game needed something unique.

Uchida needed to pivot. And came up with an out-of-this-world solution.

Instead of making a simple tank game where the player fights other tanks, what would happen if the enemy was aliens?

And even better, what if you could play as the aliens?

The Wow Entertainment team loved the idea, as some had no interest in driving a regular tank in the game, but driving an alien vehicle with crazy weaponry sounded great.⁹ It also had another trick up its sleeve: the game was fully playable online. That meant a single arcade could connect up to 8 cabinets together (similar to the smash hit, Daytona USA), or if the arcade didn’t have the space, the cabinet could use a phone line to connect to other arcades.

Sprigg would say of Uchida, “He was always trying to figure out a way to make his game special.”⁹

And so, Alien Front Online was born.

Uchida and the new Wow Entertainment team created Alien Front Online with the American market in mind, but when it came to actually sell arcade cabinets, executives at Sega suddenly got cold feet. The arcade business in the US was dwindling, so the “made for America” arcade game became a Japanese arcade exclusive. It launched in Japan on January 23, 2001.

But right after finishing the arcade version, Uchida and team started working on a Dreamcast port. Because it would be coming to a console, Uchida created two separate single-player campaigns for the game, one as the humans and the other as the aliens. This gave the game a dynamic of playing as the invader and as the defender in the same story. It also added to the length of the game, which was such a big issue with Dynamite Cop.

Another addition to the Dreamcast port was the ability to use a headset to communicate with other players. It seems mundane now, but at the time this was revolutionary: a game where you could play online with your friends AND talk to them!? Unfortunately the celebration was short-lived. After launching the Dreamcast port in November of 2021, Sega shut down the servers needed to play online in June of 2002.⁹ Sega’s future was now in jeopardy.

From Designer to Executive

By 2002, Sega was a shell of its former self. The Dreamcast failed, ending Sega’s console dynasty. Arcades were out of style and Uchida was ready to move on to a different opportunity.

In 2002, Sega approached Uchida about becoming the president and studio director of Sega Shanghai, a new studio that would utilize cheaper Chinese developers to create and support games. With that, Uchida bid farewell to America and the Wow Entertainment/AM1 team.

Once in Shanghai, Uchida’s job was that of an executive. He still had some say in the games, but no longer designed nor directed them. Running a studio left little time for Uchida to dive into the development of the games, and that lack of time necessary to create something great showed in the studios early products. Sega Shanghai developed some major misses, including Project Altered Beast (Altered Beast 2005), a 3D reboot of the original title for the Playstation 2, which was widely panned.

After these misses, the studio became more of an outsourced development company for Japanese developers who needed extra help, doing support work on games like Iron Man and Phantasy Star Universe. Sega Shanghai would also do ports of many arcade and previous console hits to the PS2 and PS3 throughout Uchida’s tenure.

Finally, after over 38 years, Makoto Uchida left Sega in 2025 to join Okayama University of Science as a professor. In his role he “researches how the skills required of video game developers evolve by examining market trends and technological progress; also investigates strategies for companies and how to nurture the talent demanded by the industry.”¹⁰

And so, one of the greatest video game developers in our time is teaching the next generation of developers. As Uchida says in his university profile, “Show by doing, explain by telling, let them try, praise them — people only act when you do all that.”¹¹

Makoto Uchida’s Legacy

Uchida initially wanted to bring spectacle to gaming, with full screen transformations in Altered Beast and eye-popping magical animations in Golden Axe. But ultimately, Uchida and the teams he worked with realized that nothing was better than solid gameplay. He mastered the art of developing beat ’em ups with Golden Axe and Die Hard Arcade. And he pushed himself to try new technologies including going online with Alien Front Online.

Ultimately, it was players around the world that benefited the most from his approach. He pushed the beat ’em up genre forward when many said it was dead, and made the impossible happen with dated hardware that would otherwise have been relegated to the scrap bin.

There are two final quotes from Uchida that speak to me personally.

“It sounds insincere, but I really believe you have to begin by paying attention to what you like, that is, what really moves you. I think it’s important to allow yourself to be moved, to be mesmerized and to be passionate about what you enjoy. Don’t hold back, try different things and feel free to express your enthusiasm for what you love.”⁸

And…

“I like joyful endings.”³

References:

1. The Making of Altered Beast: Retro Gamer No. 124
2. Horwitz, 2018, The Sega Arcade Revolution: A History in 62 Games, McFarland
3. The Making of Golden Axe: Retro Gamer, No. 128
4. Golden Axe Wikipedia Page
5. Ribbit!: Sega Retro
6. Wing War (Arcade) Lunatic Obscurity
7. Developer’s Den: Sega Technical Institute, Sega-16
8. Classic Interview: Makoto Uchida, Sega-16
9. The Making of: Alien Front Online: Retro Gamer, No. 169
10. Dynamite Cop – Revived After 10 Years: Sega Voice Vol. 38
11. Okayama University of Science – Department of Management, Faculty of Business Administration
12. Dynamite Cop – 1998 Developer Interview