SEGA recently revealed that Like a Dragon: Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii will introduce a new ported arcade game to the series’ nostalgic lineup – The Ocean Hunter. Following the announcement, RGG Studio’s technical lead Yutaka Ito shared some insights about how the game’s inclusion was decided and painstakingly handled.

The Ocean Hunter is an arcade game released in 1998 for Model 3 Sega hardware, and as its name implies, it revolves around hunting down scary sea monsters light-gun style.

On his personal X account, Ito says that RGG Studio was in talks to resurrect The Ocean Hunter for over a year before it was decided. Not only does the game have an ocean theme matching Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii’s setting, but it’s a title that’s never been ported to consoles before and would not involve any license-related complications, which made it an ideal candidate.

But from a technical point of view, making The Ocean Hunter playable on consoles was not an easy task. As the game is a dedicated arcade shooter, it took a whole lot of trial and error to rework the input and aiming mechanics in a way players won’t find impossible to beat, Ito explains.

In addition, like other arcade games appearing in Like a Dragon, The Ocean Hunter will come with a faithfully recreated in-game cabinet, which Ito also says was a “very difficult task that required the cooperation of many people.” As illustrations and instruction cards for arcade machines often have no remaining digital data left, RGG Studio’s designers have to visit stores in real-life and recreate the designs based on photographs.

RGG Studio’s Like a Dragon and Judgement series have traditionally included full recreations of various old Sega arcade games like Daytona USA 2, Spikeout, Fighting Vipers and Virtua Fighter 2. And recently, these efforts were rewarded. In August this year, RGG Studio received an engineering excellence award at CEDEC 2024 for their contributions to the revival of Model 2 and Model 3 arcade games. The award honored both the technical expertise involved and the effort to save classic arcade titles from being forgotten.

Like a Dragon: Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii is scheduled to release on February 21, 2025 for the PC (Steam), PS4/PS5 and Xbox One/Xbox Series X|S