Cat-like EA Sports executive Peter Moore has been reminiscing about the good old days, and by good old days I mean those days when he was in Sega and the company was getting thoroughly buggered by Sony and the PlayStation.
While the feline former Microsoft man had some good times at Sega, the death of the Dreamcast is described as “not a pleasant day.” Hardly surprising, considering it was he who had to ring the death knell — and fire a lot of employees in the process.
“We had a tremendous 18 months. Dreamcast was on fire – we really thought that we could do it. But then we had a target from Japan that said we had to make x hundreds of millions of dollars by the holiday season and shift x millions of units of hardware, otherwise we just couldn’t sustain the business.
So on January 31st 2001 we said Sega is leaving hardware. We were selling 50,000 units a day, then 60,000, then 100,000, but it was just not going to be enough to get the critical mass to take on the launch of PS2. Somehow I got to make that call, not the Japanese. I had to fire a lot of people, it was not a pleasant day.”
I imagine it must be unpleasant indeed to terminate a lot of jobs through the fault of nobody in particular. Still, Peter Moore is still rich, and the people he fired are probably dead, so who cares?
