creator of the arcade titles Daytona USA and Virtua Striker, devised the concept of rolling spheres through mazes based on his desire to create a game that was instantly possible to understand and play, as a contrast to increasingly complex games at Japanese arcades at the time. Prototypes involving a plain ball or a ball with an illustration were considered visually unappealing due to difficulties in perceiving its movement, so after a series of revisions monkey characters previously created by an Amusement Vision designer named Mika Kojima were placed inside the ball, with their appearance being altered to include their "distinctive" ears. Intended to feature a "cute" aesthetic and accurate physics engine, the game debuted at the 2001 Amusement Operator Union trade show as Monkey Ball, a single-player arcade cabinet controlled with a distinctive banana-shaped analog stick. In early 2001, Sega announced that it was discontinuing its Dreamcast home console and restructuring itself into a "platform-agnostic" third-party publisher. As a result, an enhanced version of Monkey Ball dubbed Super Monkey Ball was released for the GameCube as a launch game in Japan on September 14, 2001 and North America on November 18. The GameCube version was demonstrated to the public at E3 in May and at Nintendo's Space World show in August; Sega confirmed that it would arrive in time for the GameCube's launch at the June 2001 World Hobby Fair. As the first game Sega published for a Nintendo home console, Super Monkey Ball was considered a milestone for the company. Although Monkey Ball had been developed for Sega's NAOMI arcade board, which shared technology with the Dreamcast and was optimized to ensure games could be easily ported between the two platforms, Nagoshi commented that Nintendo's young demographic made the GameCube an even more fitting console for the title. According to Nagoshi, Amusement Vision staff felt more comfortable with the GameCube than Sega's own hardware and this ease of development contributed to their decision to focus on the system over the PlayStation 2 or Xbox; he also joked that Nintendo was the only hardware manufacturer the staff did not "hate". Out of a team composed of ten to twenty individuals, it took four Amusement Vision employees between several weeks and two months to port Monkey Ball to the GameCube. Its graphics were enhanced with new background details as well as reflections and particle effects. Moreover, the developers spent an