
Yoot Saito isn't mincing words about why he's getting back into games: sweet, sweet stacks of cash.
"We need to make money," says the creator of Sim Tower and Seaman. "That's the motivation. Computer games make money."
Saito's quest for money led him to the annual BitSummit festival held in Kyoto, Japan last month. Now in its fourth year, the games expo highlights the small but growing Japanese independent game scene. Nintendo signed on as a sponsor for the first time this year, underscoring the show's growing influence in a country where corporate-made games still dominate.
And in that landscape, Yutaka "Yoot" Saito, 53, is a rarity among Japanese game auteurs: he was never tied down to a single publisher or genre. His 1994 breakthrough hit, a management simulation on Macintosh called The Tower in Japan, caught the attention of SimCity maker Maxis. It rebranded the game as SimTower and released it globally.
“I didn't like games with magic and dragons and wizard things,” Saito says outside the festival, “I wanted to create SimEarth.”
Saito followed that up with Seaman, a cult classic for the Sega Dreamcast in which players used a microphone to hatch and eventually hold conversations with an unsettling fish-person creature.

Brilliant move by the creator of Seaman, embracing new gameplay ventures amidst financial challenges. Shows a true passion for game development and endless creativity in spite.