Peter Moore talks about why Sega stopped making consoles

[Kev]

Years ago I had the Saturn and the Dreamcast so I was very interested in what Peter Moore had to say in an interview with the Guardian yesterday where he talks about the the reasons Sega stopped making consoles.

Peter Moore was the head of Sega of America during the time Sega went to game development only. He is now President of EA Sports.

Heres an excerpt from the interview :

The Dreamcast was an interesting beast. Sega was so financially strapped, and it had already launched in Japan to a sort of tepid, luke-warm reaction. These are big stakes games. I mean, when you're launching a games console, you need hundreds of millions of dollars to get it off the ground… and so the North American launch was the last best chance – Europe was going to be launching but there wasn't enough there to salvage what was going to be a tough situation with the PS2 looming 12 months out … The US was the last best chance of getting the Dreamcast up and running.



We amassed a very strong line up of titles, but unfortunately, EA - God bless 'em – decided they weren't going to publish on Dreamcast. That forced me to build my own sports brand, called 2K – we came up with the name one night, because it was the Y2K period, we needed to get the packaging done and we couldn't come up with a name. So we just said, 'let's call it 2K sports'. It was the best we could come up with.


Dreamcast was a phenomenal 18 months of pain, heartache, euphoria… We thought we had it, but then Playstation came out, that infamous issue of Newsweek with the Emotion Engine on the cover… and of course, EA didn't publish which left a big hole, not only in sports but in other genres. We ended up that Christmas period not being able to get to where we needed to be – we weren't far short, we just couldn't get that critical mass…

You can read the full interview at the link below.
Peter Moore Interview: Part One

[localhost8080]

I remember the mastersystem - I didnt have one - I has a ZX spectrum, then a SNES etc.
I do remember that my friend has a master system - It had a built in gae - I cant remember the name of it but it was one of the best games I have ever played! - I need to get a mastersystem again =)

[Kev]

I never had the master system but a friend had it. There were actually some good games on it. The game which was built in was alex kidd. It wasn't as good as mario but it was still good. Whenever you switched it on without a catridge it would play alex kidd. I don't recall any other console doing that.

[Bex]

I had a master system but I don't remember that. I was like 3-5 at the time though lol.

Interesting read. I do wish the DreamCast had worked out for them. I had the master system and then the megadrive (or genesis in America ) and the sega cd And of course, Sonic being Sega too . I also had the dreamcast as well
I actually liked it too but not enough games, so I got a PS1 lol. I thought at the time that the DreamCast could have gone far though. I hear many people "diss" it too, and I can never fathom out why .

[Kev]

I loved the dreamcast. I only stopped buying games for it because they stopped making it. I think its still lying about the house somewhere. The 2d fighting games on the dreamcast were amazing.

[Bex]

I'm not sure what ever happened to mine. It got moved one day by my dad from the living room to under the kitchen table. Or the side of it, round that area regardless. One day it disappeared though when I was tempted to plug it in and have a game on it.

[localhost8080]

I never liked the dreamcast, or the megadrive. I went from the spectrum to a snes, then to an N64, then to a ps1, then a ps2, then gave up on them all together.
at the same time I had my snes I had a gameboy - it was amaising, my bro had a sega gamegear which was so much better than the gameboy, I would quite like a psp though =)

[Kev]

Did you play the dreamcast much? It really was a great system and had some great games released on it, particularly near the end.

Jet Grind Radio, Shenmue, Soul Caliber...not to mention all the sega arcade games like virtua tennis, sega rally, crazy taxi etc.It had a a few good fps games as well like quake 3 and unreal.

Also, you need to put it into perspective. The dreamcast was launched before the ps2, about a year or so before I think. I got it to replace my n64 (which I loved) and the graphics were much superior.

Of course, you always thought the graphics were much superior when you play a next generation console for the first time, it was the same when I played the 360 for the first time at my mates house.

Most serious gamers will tell you the dreamcast was a great machine. It was just promoted badly and unfortunately lost the backing of some big developers (like EA which had traditionally been very close to sega platforms)

[Kev]

The second part of the interview was posted today. It's another fantastic interview. He talks about the problems he had when he helped sega moved from a first part developer to multi format.

He then talks about his time at Microsoft. Worth checking out.

Peter Moore Interview: Part Two

[Bex]

Another interesting read, perhaps more than the first interview.

Never knew that Video was called that either, I've only seen it named as "banned xbox 360 commercial" lol.