The iconic Sega rhythm game Samba De Amigo has a lot of memorable characters, from the star of the show, Amigo, to the supporting members of the game's cast like the butterfly-wing-wearing dancer Linda, twin bears Bingo & Bongo, and the humanoid cat Rio.
However, there was one character in particular that reportedly proved troublesome to get right, as was revealed to us recently in an interview by the game's character artist Satoshi Okano: Amigo's sister Amiga.
Amiga made her debut in the Japan-exclusive Samba de Amigo Ver. 2000 (which received a fan translation in 2023), and has appeared in all of the entries since, like the 2008 Wii port and the 2023 sequel Samba de Amigo: Party Central.
She is essentially a smaller, more feminine version of her older brother. So you'd probably be forgiven for thinking she'd be one of the easier characters to come up with a design for.
But, as Okano told us, this wasn't actually the case during the game's development, with everyone having their own strong opinions on what the new character should look like. This is something he attributes to the men on the team all wanting to have a say on what a female version of Amigo would look like. This indecision led the designer to submit "around 30 to 40 designs" for the character.
To give you some reference, Okano recounts that for the other characters, he almost always got the "OK" the first time around, suggesting the design of Amiga was placed under a ridiculous amount of scrutiny, in comparison to the game's other characters
Here's the relevant part of the interview:
"It was an extremely fun two years. I handled the character designs, and Uekawa-san gave his opinions. Finally, together with Yuji Naka-san and Shun Nakamura-san, the four of us would make a final decision.
I proposed designs for Linda, a girl with brown skin and big eyes wearing a butterfly outfit, and Bingo Bongo, a pair of bears with even smaller bears inside of them. Someone pointed out that their legs had no joints, but I stuck to my guns.
The proposals were given the OK one after another—it went very smoothly. I made Chumba and Wamba as senior musicians. I almost always got the OK on my first go-around. One time, speaking about Rio, Yuji Naka said, "Do you think people will assume I'm interested in genderless characters like this, given the fact that I'm not married?" I replied jokingly, "That'd be funny!
In Japan, there was a follow-up to the game called Samba de Amigo Ver. 2000 that never got an overseas release. That game had a new character in it called Amiga, and she was really tough to get designed, because men all want to give their opinions on female characters. I submitted around 30 or 40 designs, and after all of that, the most orthodox idea of them all was the one that was accepted."
You can read the rest of our conversation with Okano here, or visit our "Making Of" article on his earlier work on KaZe Co. Ltd's F-Zero-esque racer Uchuu Race: Astro Go! Go! as a character designer and planner, if you want to learn more about his career prior to joining Sega.