This is Steve's little icon used in the Sega Team Challenge newsletters.

Well, here we go with another Sega8Bit interview; this time with Steve Hanawa, whose caricature you see above. I'm sure you're wondering what took me so long with this one, because I announced it several months ago, roughly right after I spoke with John Sauer. This time around things were going fine, but some trouble with spam filters and other issues led to a bit of a hold-up, but now it's finally together. I want to first extend my gratitude to Steve for being so willing to answer our questions for this interview amongst his incredibly busy schedule; it was enjoyable talking with him and I learned quite a bit of background history about Sega and the Master System. Herein you'll find lots of interesting tidbits from the early days. In case you don't have a clue who Steve Hanawa is, let me start with how I found out myself.

After I finished my interview John, I continued to go through my Sega Team Challenge newsletters since I paid so much for them and read over an article in the first issue. It was an interview with the head of research and development, Steve Hanawa. Steve had a few later articles he wrote for the monthly magazine all under the header of 'Tech Talk,' where he answered questions about Sega hardware. If you're wondering about it here's the original article. Searching around on the internet briefly to see what else he did, I wondered if I might have a chance at finding him and setting up another discussion of the Master System and the personal history of someone who worked with it at the time. So, as usual, these things just take a little hard work and a lot of searching...

After a while, and pretty much by accident, I located a man by the name of Tom Sloper, another veteran from the Master System days who was actually the producer of the four Activision games; Bomber Raid, Cyborg Hunter, Galaxy Force and Rampage. He's apparently quite a Mah-Jong enthusiast and even programmed a version of the popular Asian game for Yahoo. That's how I ended up finding him; it was a somewhat random occurence while I searched around for game rules. I found Tom had purchased an automatic Mah-Jong dealing table and repaired it with the help of someone named Steve Hanawa. I looked at the pictures on his site of this man, sitting at a table, looked at my newsletters, and took a chance emailing Tom to see what I could figure out. Sure enough...

I forwarded your message to Steve Hanawa. It's up to him whether or not he wants to be interviewed.

So, was I lucky? Well, obviously, yeah, but pretend you don't know for the moment...

Hi Stan,

My friend Tom forwarded your emails. Yes, I am the Steve Hanawa you've ben looking for. I'd be happy to answer your questions about my Sega days. I have briefly looked at the website and it looks really great.

All the best,

Steve Hanawa
(ex Sega now with DiMAGIC)

So yes, I did find him. That being said, let's move on now to the actual interview. The following will be written based off of the questions I asked Steve as well as those posed by forum members, including all follow-ups. I found after my interview with Scott Marshall that writing an article based on whatever questions were asked worked the best and flowed better. So, that's what you're going to be reading. Let's begin on the next page.

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