Toshihiro Nagoshi made his name with cars and made his reputation with gangsters. He joined Sega in 1989, designed for Yu Suzuki on Virtua Racing, and directed Daytona USA, the arcade racer that, as Edge put it, became “a sensation the world over” after Sega had prepared only a limited number of machines. Running his own studio, he made a game about a monkey in a ball and an F-Zero for Nintendo. Then he created Ryu Ga Gotoku, known in the West as Yakuza, a series so full of its maker’s tastes that Edge’s reviewer suspected that the column Nagoshi wrote for the magazine “was really a design diary”.
Joining Sega
Nagoshi studied in Tokyo and joined Sega in 1989. His first choice had been elsewhere. “Originally, I wanted to join Nintendo but it was based in Kyoto,” he told Edge in 1998, laughing. “I’m from Tokyo and went to university there.”
At Sega he spent five years working under Yu Suzuki in the arcade division that became AM2, “as the main designer”, in Edge’s words, on Virtua Racing and Daytona USA. Racing was not only a job. The same profile noted that he drove to work every day in a Ferrari Dino.
Daytona USA and Scud Race
Daytona USA (1994) was the launch game for Sega’s texture-mapped Model 2 arcade board. Nagoshi told Edge that he wanted to make “a fun 3D racing game”, and that people said it “would not succeed because of the emphasis on fun”. He directed it: Edge’s first look at the game printed the credit as “Director: T. Nagushi”, and the magazine was still calling him “the director of the original coin-op version” in 2000.
For the Model 3 board he produced and directed Scud Race (1996). In February 1997 he went out of his way to tell Edge that it was a different game: “Scud Race is not Daytona 2.” “Daytona was based on an American sport, with American cars. I wanted to make a game that would be accepted worldwide.” So he built it around supercars that everyone would know, and went to the Ferrari factory in Modena to see the real ones. He also wanted it approachable: “I didn’t want to make a difficult racing game.”
He produced the sequel he had resisted, Daytona USA 2, in 1998, by then as AM2’s associate general manager, with a team of 20.
Amusement Vision
In 2000 Nagoshi became president of Amusement Vision, one of the studios Sega made out of its development departments; his byline in Edge described it as “formerly Sega subsidiary Soft R&D #4”. He also became an Edge columnist, writing “AV Out” for the magazine from the early 2000s, a column whose subjects ran from Sega’s withdrawal from hardware to his favourite drinks.
Amusement Vision’s breakthrough was Monkey Ball. Nagoshi described it in his column in 2001 as a game that “involves — as the title suggests — a monkey and a ball. The monkey is inside the ball, the player moves a joystick” to tilt the maze around it. The arcade original went to Nintendo’s GameCube as Super Monkey Ball, and Edge gave it nine out of ten in November 2001, summing it up in one word: “genius”.
Sega’s exit from hardware led to a stranger commission: an F-Zero for Nintendo. “A year ago, such a project would have never been possible,” Nagoshi wrote in June 2002. “But Dreamcast is over and we are out of the hardware business.” Nintendo was “the title supplier” and Shigeru Miyamoto the general producer, but Nagoshi was “fully in charge of the game project”, planning, directing and producing it. He took it on for a simple reason: “I really love this game, F-Zero … It’s the number one reason why I accepted this project, much more than the business factor.” The result, F-Zero GX for the GameCube with an arcade version, F-Zero AX, came out in 2003. When Sega merged its studios again in 2003, Edge reported that Nagoshi, as general manager of the new Sega Creative Center division, now helped oversee the creative output of all of Sega’s divisions.
Yakuza
Ryu Ga Gotoku, “translating as ‘Like A Dragon’”, came out in Japan for the PlayStation 2 at the end of 2005; Edge reviewed an import copy in February 2006, and Sega released it in the West as Yakuza. It follows Kazuma Kiryu, a gangster “returning to a world he knows only too well” in the night city of Kamurocho, and mixes street brawls with what Edge counted as some 70 side events, along with a casino and a pit-fighting tournament. Its story was “penned by a novelist, voiced by professional actors”.
Edge found the game “very much Nagoshi’s”, to the extent that details such as “an impromptu drinking contest, Kazuma’s snakeskin shoes” made the reviewer wonder if his column “was really a design diary”. When the English version arrived the magazine said the same thing more fondly: for readers who remembered his columns, “encountering his obsessions in-game — particularly the detailed lectures on different whiskies — was like meeting up with an old friend”. It also gave Nagoshi some credit back after his previous game, deciding that he “has more than acquitted himself for the numb SpikeOut: Battle Street”.
The series became the centre of his career. He is credited as general director of Yakuza 3, 4 and 5 on the PlayStation 3 and executive director of Yakuza 0 and Yakuza 6 on the PlayStation 4, and the team that made them became Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio, which he headed; Sega Retro records that he also became Sega’s chief creative officer in 2012. Edge found him at the 2013 Tokyo Game Show as “Toshihiro Nagoshi of Sega’s Yakuza Studio”.
Leaving Sega
In October 2021 Nagoshi announced that he was leaving Sega after more than 30 years. “As I depart from SEGA, I’m also leaving my position as the head of Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio,” he wrote. Wireframe reported that he had gone to the Chinese company NetEase, taking his long-standing collaborator Daisuke Sato with him, and that Masayoshi Yokoyama had become head of the studio.
At NetEase he set up Nagoshi Studio. Its first game, Gang of Dragon, starring the actor Ma Dong-seok, was announced at The Game Awards in December 2025. Three months later Bloomberg reported, and Video Games Chronicle repeated, that NetEase had told the studio it would stop funding the game in May 2026, after finding that it needed a further ¥7 billion to finish; neither company commented on the report.
Sources
- Edge, issue 42, February 1997, p. 50: Scud Race feature and interview.
- Edge, issue 59, June 1998, pp. 55–58: Daytona USA 2 prescreen and interview (his joining Sega, Nintendo, Yu Suzuki, the Ferrari Dino, his team).
- Edge, issue 91, December 2000, p. 50: Daytona USA for the Dreamcast, with Nagoshi as director of the original and president of Amusement Vision; Model 2’s launch title, the limited first run and the game’s success.
- Edge, issue 7, April 1994: first look at Daytona USA, with the credit “Director: T. Nagushi”.
- Edge, “AV Out” columns, 2001–2004: issue 98, June 2001 (Monkey Ball); issue 111, June 2002, p. 24 (F-Zero). The columns’ byline describes him as “president of Amusement Vision, formerly Sega subsidiary Soft R&D #4”.
- Edge, issue 103, November 2001, p. 72: Super Monkey Ball review.
- Edge, issue 176, June 2007: Sega’s studio heads, with Nagoshi as president of Amusement Vision from 2000.
- Edge, issue 129, November 2003: Sega’s restructuring; Nagoshi as general manager of the Sega Creative Center division.
- Edge, issue 159, February 2006, pp. 32–33: Ryu Ga Gotoku import review.
- Edge, issue 171, January 2007, p. 65: the year’s highlights, Yakuza.
- Edge, issue 260, December 2013: Tokyo Game Show report.
- Wireframe, issue 56, October 2021, p. 20: “Yakuza exits”.
- Luke Plunkett, “Yakuza Creator Confirms He’s Leaving Sega, Former Series Producer Joins Him”, Kotaku, 8 October 2021 (web, secondary). https://kotaku.com/yakuza-creator-confirms-hes-leaving-sega-former-series-1847824165
- Andy Robinson, “Nagoshi Studio reportedly facing closure, after NetEase ‘pulls Gang of Dragon funding’”, Video Games Chronicle, 7 March 2026 (web, secondary), reporting Bloomberg. https://www.videogameschronicle.com/news/nagoshi-studio-reportedly-facing-closure-after-netease-pulls-gang-of-dragon-funding/
- Sega Retro, “Toshihiro Nagoshi” (web, secondary): date of birth, year of joining Sega, chief creative officer from April 2012, and game credits, including Virtua Racing, Scud Race, Super Monkey Ball, F-Zero GX and the Yakuza series. https://segaretro.org/Toshihiro_Nagoshi
- Wikipedia, “Toshihiro Nagoshi” (web, secondary): date of birth; Gang of Dragon at The Game Awards 2025. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toshihiro_Nagoshi