– Peter Moore, speaking to Glixel about his memories of when the Dreamcast died.
Longtime game industry hypeman Peter Moore is moving on this summer to take a job as CEO of the Liverpool Football Club.
Along the way he’s done a sort of game industry exit interview with Glixel that’s well worth reading, as Moore tells a few remarkable stories about his experiences serving in an executive role at companies like Electronic Arts, Microsoft, and Sega.
The Sega stories are especially interesting because Moore was brought on right around the time of the Dreamcast launch, and rose to prominence as the face of Sega of America.
He chats with Glixel about what it was like to try and work with the Japanese side of Sega (“I said to the translator, ‘Tell [Sonic creator Yuji Naka] to fuck off.’ And the poor guy looks at me and says, ‘There’s no expression in Japanese'”), as well as how it felt to be involved in the death of Sega’s home console business.
“So the decision was made, ‘We’re gonna end this, and we’re gonna turn into a third party.’ And then somehow it was my job to ‘make the call.’ That’s something I have been, and forever will be, tainted with. ‘He made the call to kill the Dreamcast.’ No I didn’t. But my job was to make the phone call, because the Japanese said, ‘we need you to host the conference call,'” Moore said.
“Then we had to let go half of Sega of America that afternoon, and it was just tough. Then my job was to go talk to my new friends at Sony and Nintendo and ask for dev kits. You know, I’d been ripping them to shreds for, like, two, three years, and then it’s like, ‘Oops, can I have some dev kits for our teams?'”
You can (and should) read the rest of Glixel’s chat with Moore, as he shares a bunch of other interesting anecdotes about his nearly two decades of work in the game industry.