When you're talking about the truly great RPGs of the 1990s, sooner or later, Phantasy Star IV: The End of the Millennium is going to crop up in the conversation.
Released in 1993 in Japan and 1995 in the West, the game cost just under $100 in North America, which made its subsequent commercial success in that region all the more remarkable. It turns out the game very nearly didn't come out in the West at all and was priced high in an effort to stymie sales.
This is all according to Victor Ireland, founder of the now-defunct Working Designs, a company which localised a series of Japanese games for the Western market – including Lunar, Popful Mail, Alundra, Dragon Force and many more.
Speaking on the Retro Hangover podcast, Ireland reveals that Sega of America was initially going to pass on publishing Phantasy Star IV in the US until he showed an interest:
The reason Phantasy Star IV came out the US from Sega was because of me.
It wasn't supposed to come out. They had rejected it. And I found out about it because I was dealing with Sega Japan a lot. I said, 'oh my god, I will absolutely license it. We'll do a cartridge.' I don't want to do cartridges because they're very expensive up front, but I know that this will sell a lot of games.
Then Sega Japan went to Sega US because they had an adversarial relationship, let's be honest. And they were like, 'well, look, if this is so bad, why is Working Designs all hot to get this game and bring it out to the US?'
Ireland claims that Sega of America decided to publish the game off the back of him pushing to license it but deliberately priced it high so it would be a commercial flop, thereby vindicating the original stance in the eyes of Sega of Japan:
Sega US was like, look, okay, we will take this game, we're going to price it so high that nobody will buy it so we can be proved right in the end when the sales suck.
The PR was like, 'oh, it's because it's a big ROM, blah, blah, blah.' It had nothing to do with that. If we had done it, it would have been a $69 game, no problem. And they could have done it at $69, too. But they priced it at a hundred bucks because they didn't want it to sell.
They wanted the sales to be low so that Sega Japan was like, oh, Sega US was right. Well, surprise, they sold out. It was very popular, even at a hundred bucks... and I made some enemies at Sega US.
Ireland adds that Sega of America was famously anti-RPG at the time and that this stance would continue towards the close of the Saturn era, when former Sony boss Bernie Stolar came on board at Sega (Stolar, you may remember, was the person who decreed that there shouldn't be any RPGs on PlayStation).
You can listen to the full podcast here.