Here you shall find an archive of Sega-related quotes. One day I hope
to put these in some kind of logical/chronological order. Don't be
afraid to send in any good ones, along with the name of the source!
Tom Kalinske (president and CEO,
Sega of America): Nintendo was a tough competitor. I admire them for
it. They went to all the third-party developers and said, "If you
support Sega, we won't get you your gamechips on time." Or they told
retailers, "If you put Sega games on your shelf, you're not gonna get
your new Mario games for a while."
Michael Katz (president, Sega of America): In '88, when I was still at
Atari, Hayao Nakayama and Dave Rosen brought us the Genesis. They asked
if we wanted to license the product. At the time, we needed a
next-generation system to take on Nintendo, and Genesis would've been
perfect. But Jack Tramiel turned it down.
Katz: Ironically, one year after Sega approached Atari, I took over
Sega of America, where I was in the same position I'd been in all
along: Nintendo had all the hot arcade licensees tied up. We needed a
character to introduce with Genesis and compete with Mario. Nobody knew
who Sonic was. American kids didn't even know what a hedgehog was, but
it didn't matter. It was a terrific game that you could get only on
Genesis.
Gail Tilden (advertising manager, Nintendo): Sonic was very successful,
but it was the sports titles that made Sega a stronghold in the
business.
Katz: I had to convince the Japanese to pay Joe Montana $1.7 million up
front to use his name, and they were dead set against it, because we
didn't have a game yet. We had to lock up Montana before he signed with
Nintendo. It was the hottest-selling sports game for a year and a half.
We lined up Buster Douglass for boxing for the two months he had the
crown. We had Tommy Lasorda baseball. Then we got John Madden from
Electronic Arts, and that went through the roof.
Katz: Nakayama gave the orders to sell a million units of Genesis
against Nintendo's Super NES. The only Japanese I knew was the
translation for 1 million units: hyakuman-dai. I was supposed to chant
it in the morning, while I shaved, in my car. We sold 500,000, which I
thought was pretty darn good, because every Nintendo owner was waiting
until the summer of '91, when the Super Nintendo was coming out, to
decide which one to buy. I always tell people that we only did half a
hyak, and that's why I got fired.
Tom Kalinske (president and CEO, Sega of America): After my first month
as CEO, I told Mr. Nakayama, "You have to get rid of Altered Beast, the
title that's bundled with Genesis. It sounds like devil worship. We
have to get the price down to $149, and we have to develop more
American software." The board spoke for two hours in Japanese and I was
just sitting there, not understanding a word. Finally Mr. Nakayama
said, "No one here agrees with anything you've said." I thought mine
was going to be the shortest career in the business. But as I was
walking out, he said, "But I hired you to make the decisions for Europe
and the Americas, so go ahead and do it.
Greg Fischbach (CEO, Acclaim): When we released Mortal Kombat, it
revolutionized the industry, in terms of the attention it got and the
older players that came to the game. Nintendo felt the no-blood version
was more appropriate for its system; Sega told us to put a label on the
box so people would know what they were getting. And we sold three
times as many units for Sega.
Kalinske: The specs for our next-generation console, the Saturn,18
didn't look very good, and it was way too expensive - Sega Japan told
us it was going to retail at $549. Then Jim Clark, the chair of Silicon
Graphics, says, "I've got this chipset that's a derivative of the MIPS
chipset that would be perfect for your system." We call Sega Japan and
say this thing will be cheaper than Saturn, and that it will move
polygons 50 percent quicker. The Sega hardware group comes over and
says that the chip is too big, it won't be efficient to manufacture.
Forget it. When I tell Jim Clark this, he says, "What do I do with this
now?" And I say, "Well, I'm sure there are a few folks who might be
interested in buying it." And he says, "Yeah, I've already talked to
Nintendo." The rest is N64 history.
Kalinske: I felt horrible about bringing Saturn to market. I was being
forced to introduce the machine with a very high price, and its
performance was terrible. We knew it was terrible. Sega Japan said,
"You've got to bring Saturn out before PlayStation." Which we did -
it came out four months earlier than PlayStation. Then they said we'd
only have 70,000 ready by then. Well, how can you introduce a platform
with only 70,000 units? I sent a memo to Japan in 1995, saying Sega
would be better off just becoming a software company - we could support
Sony, and even Nintendo. They sent a reply: "We will always be in the
hardware business."
Tom Kalinske (president and CEO, Sega of America): The managements of
Sega and Sony were very close. Sony asked us if they could develop
software for the Sega CD, and we even taught Sony how to do CD-based
games. We ran the specs on what we thought would be the perfect game
platform, based on our R&D guys at Sega of America. We took it to
Japan, and, believe it or not, Sony Japan agreed that it was a great
idea. We'd build a hardware platform together and share the loss,
because there surely would be a loss on any kind of hardware platform.
Sega would get the benefit of whatever software it developed, and
whatever Sony developed belonged to Sony. We went to Sega's board, and
they said, "What, are you crazy? Sony doesn't know anything about
building a game system, and they don't know anything about software.
Why would you want to partner with them?" So that was the end of that.
Yu Suzuki (AM2) : Trying to program for two CPUs has its problems.
Virtua Fighter uses a different CPU for calculating each character. The
two CPUs start at the same time but there's a delay when one has to
wait for the other to catch up. One very fast central processor would
be preferable. I don't thank that all programmers have the ability to
program two CPUs - most can only get about one-and-a-half times the
speed you can get from one SH-2. I think that only one in 100
programmers are good enough to get that kind of speed out of the
Saturn.
