Development
Enemy Zero began life on Sony's PlayStation. Irritated by Sony's failure to meet even a third of preorders for the PlayStation version of D, at a Sony conference Kenji Eno made a shocking move. Eno showed a preview of Enemy Zero. At the end of the clip the PlayStation logo appeared, but slowly transitioned into the Sega Saturn logo. Despite popular opinion that the Saturn cannot handle 3D games as well as the PlayStation, Eno commented "...the PlayStation and the Saturn aren't that different, so moving it to Saturn wasn't too difficult."
While Eno did the music for D, Michael Nyman, composer for films such as Gattaca and The Piano, was hired to create a score for this WARP title. In an interview, Kenji Eno explained how this came about:
...I like Michael Nyman a lot, and I like his soundtracks, so I was thinking that it would be awesome if I could get him to do the music. I thought, "That would be impossible, but it'd be great if that happened." ...then, there was a big earthquake in Kobe, Japan in 1995, and Michael Nyman was donating pianos to schools in the city. When this earthquake happened, he said that he wanted to check out how the pianos that he donated were doing, so he came to Japan. When I found out that he was in Japan, I invited him back to my hotel room and tried to convince him, for six hours, to come work with me. So, at the end, Michael was like, "OK, I'll do it, I'll do it. Just let me go back to my room." So he went back exhausted after being convinced for six hours. We didn't work out terms or conditions; he just said that he would do it.
Released and received with much hype in Japan at the end of 1996, E0 was released in North America and Europe in 1997 under Sega Enterprises. Despite being critically panned, it was later ported to the PC by Sega.
20 copies of a limited edition of the Saturn version were produced and sold for a price roughly equal to 2,000 US dollars. These special copies were hand-delivered to recipients by Kenji Eno himself. The game thus holds the record for the "Most Exclusive Special Edition" of a video game, according to the 2012 Guinness World Records Gamer's Edition. Due to popularity in Japan, Sega sponsored the production of a few Enemy Zero items such as the official Enemy Zero soundtrack by Michael Nyman, a model of the in-game gun, and a strategy guide.
Fumito Ueda, director of the cult video games Ico and Shadow of the Colossus, worked as an animator on this game, before becoming a video game director.
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