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Hidden Palace and Sega Retro PROUDLY present...

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Dark Empires at Hidden Palace
Dark Empires at Sega Retro

Craig Stitt interview

Sega Technical Institute was Sega of America's first attempt at an internal game development division. Headed by Mark Cerny, an American developer who had spent the previous three years at Sega's Tokyo headquarters developing Master System software, the small autonomous studio first began operations in an unassuming San Jose business park in January 1990. It was deliberately positioned near Sega Enterprises USA (Sega of Japan's US arcade division) rather than Sega of America's headquarters in San Francisco to insulate the fledgling studio from what Cerny saw as unproductive and excessive oversight from company management. Most importantly, STI reported directly to Sega's Japanese management and was granted the unique privilege of bypassing Sega of America's concept approval processes.

Cerny's original vision for STI had been to establish a hybrid training and development center where inexperienced American talent could learn directly from visiting Japanese developers, eventually creating an American-led studio capable of addressing what Sega of America viewed as an over-reliance on Japanese software. Sega had originally planned to send eleven Japanese arcade developers to California, but after the US embassy in Tokyo denied their O-1 visa applications and temporarily barred further submissions, Cerny was forced to build an American team without assistance from Japan. Despite these constraints, his concept of an open development environment encouraged staff to freely conceive and pitch their own ideas - principles that would give rise to the studio's history of experimental projects.

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STI began development of its first original game in 1990, the action-platformer Kid Chameleon, a result of Cerny's initiative to create a character-driven global blockbuster franchise. However, it wasn't the only original project undertaken by the fledgling studio. That same year, Bill Dunn, a designer at STI and tabletop gaming enthusiast, conceptualized a fantasy-based tactical strategy game for the Sega Genesis. The new title would reference the design of Technosoft's recently released Herzog Zwei, a novel title which brought real-time strategy gameplay to home console owners. Cerny approved the concept later that year, assigning programmers Scott Chandler and Ken Rose, alongside artists Yasushi Yamaguchi and Craig Stitt, to development. No audio staff were assigned to the game, but Stitt speculates that music and sound would have been handled by an outside composer.

Stitt in particular was enthused to join the project. A traditional artist and illustrator who shared Dunn's love of tabletop games, Stitt specialized in fantasy artwork, regularly creating monster designs for his own tabletop campaigns, with his work characterized by an emphasis on dragons. He recalls, "The style was right up my alley. This fantasy Dungeons & Dragons [style], monsters and weird stuff. I remember just working up a whole bunch of different ways, different things to build." Alongside Dunn, the two collaborated with Cerny on designing a top-down fantasy tactical strategy game set in a world of dragons and monsters, with different factions vying for control of the land. The game which would become known as Dark Empires officially began early production at STI's original San Jose offices sometime in 1990.

Stitt was largely unfamiliar with strategy games before being assigned to Dark Empires, but was also a fan of the aforementioned Herzog Zwei. "I loved that game, played that all the time, but that was about the only strategy game I've ever played." He went on to create over a dozen pieces of concept art for the project, including early artwork of the game's unimplemented science fiction setting and a range of distinct units and tiles. Genesis graphics were created on Sega of Japan's Digitizer System, a light-pen-based graphics workstation shipped to California by Japanese management, with Stitt's artwork adopting a detailed medieval fantasy style inspired by his Dungeons & Dragons illustration experience.

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Dark Empires would be structured around two opposing factions (consisting of gold and purple dragons and their respective leaders in the dumped prototype) engaging in battle across a selection of six different planets. Each faction would have a leader unit that functions similarly to a king in chess, with victory achieved by defeating the opposing faction's leader. The game was planned to progress through evolving time periods over the course of gameplay, with concept art depicting settings such as Natural, Fantasy, Prehistory, Horrific, and Cybernetic. Gameplay itself would alternate between two perspectives: a zoomed-out view reminiscent of Herzog Zwei, where players move individual groups of four units across the battlefield, and a hexagonal unit-based view in which individual units can be commanded to both move and attack the enemy faction.

The team had planned a number of then-novel mechanics for Dark Empires, including neutral temples which players could enter to initiate a battle against a ram-headed enemy controlled by the opposing player. Defeating this enemy would reward the player with an additional single-dragon squad to command, requiring players to balance time and unit management against the possibility of expanding their forces. In addition to the two main player factions, wild dragons would roam the map as hostile forces that would attack either side, controlled by the enemy player once engaged. Units also possess nonfunctioning experience bars that gradually increase during play, seemingly intended as a leveling system for individual unit growth.

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Development progressed into late 1991, when the game reached a first-playable state, featuring basic and mostly functional combat gameplay and the framework for a promising American-designed console tactical strategy game. However, as strategy games for home consoles were then an unproven and largely unheard of concept, Cerny's desire to focus on large blockbuster titles was bound to eventually clash with a game of relatively niche market appeal. Further, the studio was already beginning to suffer from recurring mismanagement problems, particularly in the allocation of project resources like assigned staff. To compound matters, Sega of America's marketing department had just tasked STI with starting production of Sonic the Hedgehog 2 that November, with Yamaguchi leaving the project to help lead that game's development. Shortly after the completion of its first-playable prototype, Dark Empires was cancelled in December 1991.

Craig Stitt later recycled certain Dark Empires concepts for use in future projects; among these was the design for a bald, disembodied human head with striking green eyes, a concept which would evolve into Kid Chameleon's final boss, Heady Metal. Also repurposed was one of Dark Empires' more developed planned leader units, the Elf King, appearing as a playable character in his pitch for the ultimately undeveloped 1993 Genesis fighting game SpellCaster. Stitt later noted potential connections between the cancelled project and his later pitch for Spyro the Dragon, including the emphasis on dragons and the concept of evolving time periods. "That wasn't a conscious thing, but there very much is a connection there somewhere."

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Following its cancellation, Dark Empires went virtually undocumented until Stitt uploaded a 1995 video résumé of his STI work to YouTube in August 2020, including five Digitizer stills of gameplay and a set of sprite art from the game, publicly revealing the project for the first time. Commenting on the video, he also revealed that he had a working ROM image. Five years later in August 2025, Sega Retro editor Alexander Rojas interviewed Stitt on his career and Sega Technical Institute work, including coverage of Dark Empires. During the interview process, Stitt shared his copy of the ROM - which had thankfully been retained by Ken Rose after all these years. The game was subsequently documented by both Rojas and technical researcher MDTravis, allowing Dark Empires to finally see the light of day nearly 34 years after its cancellation.

The dumped prototype, dated September 1991, identifies itself with the ROM header KEVIN KIDD - an early working title for Kid Chameleon conceived as a Western-oriented continuation of the Alex Kidd lineage - suggesting Dark Empires was built upon that game's source assets. At this point in development, however, the prototype is markedly incomplete. The password system and menu options are nonfunctional, with every stage selection loading into an identical battlefield. Units are also limited to a single attack per turn, leaving combat skeletal in design, and sound is absent altogether. Regardless, the build marks an early effort by Sega of America's flagship R&D studio to explore concepts outside the norm and exists as a fascinating example of Sega Technical Institute's pre-Sonic 2 development output.

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Special thanks go to Craig Stitt, for both sharing the ROM and for graciously agreeing to a nearly four-hour interview, MDTravis for his extensive technical assistance and for his detailed ROM analysis, and Armadylo for editing and proofreading this article.

Alexander Rojas (CartridgeCulture)


Have a happy Halloween!

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