Keith Stuart ON the Sega Model 1 arcade board

Interview with Keith Stuart

Keith has been writing about games for 30 years, starting out at Edge in 1995 and later editing Future Publishing’s unofficial Dreamcast magazine, DC-UK. He became The Guardian’s first-ever games editor in the late 2000s, helping to usher in a new era of mainstream game coverage. He has written two books on the history of Sega, and is also the best-selling author of novels such as A Boy Made of Blocks and Love is a Curse.

Keith ON the Sega Model 1 arcade board in ON: Volume One.

What was the last piece of technology - of hardware - that had the same kind of sense of soul as the Sega Model 1 board?

Keith Stuart: I would love to say Dreamcast, but I feel I ought to move beyond Sega hardware. Instead I'm going to go with Playdate, the teeny handheld console from Panic, which comes with a square display and a little hand crank. I feel that the design behind the device is so single-minded and focused, and that its form factor perfectly expresses the types of experiences you will have on it. I love the fact that it eschews all current orthodoxies on what portable gaming devices should be - which is essentially glorified mini PCs. It is idiosyncratic, which takes us back to the Model 1 era, when hardware all tended to look and perform very differently and supported diverse gaming experiences. 

For you, what separates something like the Sega Model 1 board from other bits of technology that don't move you as much?

Keith Stuart: It was such a singular technology, steadfastly designed by one of the leading game designers of the era to deliver a very specific visual and interactive experience. I love the way that the use of flat-shaded polygons was both the result of technical limitations, but also a purposeful visual aesthetic that has stood the test of time. I think in the games world we're conditioned to think that the best work will come out of bottomless processing power, but art has always, and will always, thrive on limitations. The Model 1 board is an example of this. 

Can you say a little about what you love so much about the aesthetic the Sega Model 1 board gave games?

Keith Stuart: It is the visual purity of the flat shaded poly that I love - games are stripped back to their very fundamental elements: shape, colour and light, which means us gamers are doing a lot of the imaginative work ourselves. There is also a real beauty and grace to Virtua Racing and Virtua Fighter that recalls cubism and Bauhaus and other modernist artistic movements. 

If you could pick only one of the Sega Model 1 board games to play, which one would it be and why?

Keith Stuart: Virtua Racing - because it absolutely represents Yu Suzuki's vision for what 3D animation could do at that point in time, and it still feels gorgeous as a racing game.

Read the full feature in ON: Volume One: