"He's very friendly," said Toshihiro Nagoshi, president of Amusement Vision Ltd, one of Sega's 11 game software development units.
"He listens to our ideas, asks us about risks, and if he's convinced, he gives us a go."
Saddled with the unpopular Dreamcast -- Sega sold just one of the consoles for every five PlayStation 2s sold by rival Sony Corp last year -- Okawa in January made the decision to exit the hardware business.
The decision helped Sega stock jump more than 150 percent this year, outpacing Nintendo and Sony shares several times over.
The shares rose ?5, or 0.2 percent, to ?2,815 yesterday.
Sato, who has two teenaged daughters, oversaw the development of Dreamcast for seven years. The Tokyo resident was made vice president less than five months before his appointment to succeed Okawa as president.
His challenge is to develop hit games, analysts said.
Though Sega has a library of more than 1,000 software titles, the company can no longer rely on a captive audience of game players owning a Dreamcast.
Sega must now stand out among software designers whose budgets have soared as they seek greater realism in their games.
Sega will make 11 video-game software titles for Microsoft's Xbox, including remakes of existing titles and a new game, Gun Valkyrie.
The company has also tied up with Sony and Namco Ltd to develop equipment to be installed at game centers run by Sega and Namco later this year to deliver digital content using optical-fiber networks and faster Internet connections.
Sega last week said it will develop at least 10 games for Nintendo's GameCube, the Kyoto-based gamemaker's successor to the Nintendo 64 game console.
Titles will include Super Monkey Ball, an arcade game, and the soccer game Virtua Striker 3 Ver.2002. The company is also developing Phantasy Star Online for GC, a network role-playing game originally developed for the Dreamcast and part of the company's emphasis on teaming players through the Internet.
"Sega's revival was Okawa's strong wish," Sato told reporters and analysts last month. "Now we need to make sure this wish becomes the goal of each Sega employee."
Sega is pulling out all stops. The company is betting heavily on Sakura Wars 3, an action game which debuted in March.
The third title in the series, Sakura Wars 3: Is Paris Burning? features naval officer Ichiro Oogami joining a female assault group charged with ridding Paris of marauding phantoms.
To enhance the realism of the title's design, Sega's game developers took a week-long trip to Paris in March 2000, visiting metro stations, the Arc de Triumphe and numerous cafes and back alleys. Sega expects to sell 350,000 copies of the game in Japan this year.
The title has spawned fan Web sites, books, music CDs and trading cards, and even a petition to have Sega release the title in the US.
"A game console is just a delivery vehicle," Sato told reporters at a press conference in March. "What is most important for us is the content that gets delivered."
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