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Peter Moore, SVP of Sega of America: A Contender You Shouldn't Count Out
by Steven Kent for Gamers Today
Having just come from Reebok, Peter Moore, Sega of America's Senior Vice President of Marketing, is fairly new to the video games business. Moore has joined Sega in a crucial and pivotal time. Sega is preparing to release Dreamcast, its new 128-bit game console, this September.
Dreamcast is a sturdy and powerful piece of hardware, but it will have an uphill battle.
Having dropped out of the home console market over a year ago, Sega has neither the funding nor the momentum of Sony and Nintendo. In the past, consumers have generally been sick of the old generation of game consoles by the time a new one comes out. Judging by the brisk sales, consumers have not tired of Nintendo 64 and PlayStation, making Sega's marketing job even more difficult.
But Sega has an important ace up its sleeve-Dreamcast is a very impressive console. Able to render graphics at 10 times the speed of the PlayStation and Nintendo 64, Dreamcast runs games with extraordinary detail. On the other hand, Sega may have jumped the gun on technology. Dreamcast is exceptionally powerful compared to PlayStation and Nintendo 64, but its specifications fall far short when compared with the consoles that Sony and Nintendo have under development. This is how Moore sees Sega's future-both short- and long-term:
Gamers Today: Sega is still on-course to have 15 games ready for the launch of Dreamcast?
Peter Moore: Fifteen. That's almost the minimum. At some point you have to draw a line in the sand and say, "enough." There are 15 confirmed titles. We're still discussing some games with third-parties who, coming out of E3, are enthused about our launch plans.
I think 15, quite frankly, is ample. In my brief career in this particular industry, it's pretty evident to me that no platform has ever launched with that breadth of titles.
GT: Where were you before you came to Sega?
PM: I was at Reebok.
GT: Have you been in the video game industry before?
PM: No, I haven't; Only as a major consumer over the years. I just moved from Boston last week, and as I was clearing out my basement, I found my Duck Hunt guns from the original Nintendo system.
GT: Gray or orange?
PM: I had an orange set and a gray set. I got the second set after the Federal government decided to crack down on the gray set. (The gray gun was found to look too realistic, and Nintendo was asked to make the gun with less realistic colors.) As if I would use my Duck Hunt guns for some Federal offense.
I was raised in a pub. My father bought the first Pong game as an amusement for the people in the bar he ran in the early 70's. It was the first in within a 50 mile radius and I can still remember perfecting the flick of the wrist to get the backspin on the; that annoying little dot. I guess you could say my gaming experience goes back 26 years.
GT: What are the standouts among your 15 launch titles?
PM: Oh, now there's a question. Obviously our core titles are Sonic Adventure, Virtual Fighter 3tb, The House of the Dead 2, and NFL 2000. I think we've got two major winners from among our third-party titles, too. The two absolute standouts are Soul Calibur (from Namco) and Ready 2 Rumble (from Midway).
GT: Interestingly, Sonic Adventure didn't score as well as you might have hoped at this year's E3.
PM: Sonic Adventure has already been released in Japan. A lot of people have got the Japanese game. For many people, it was their first glimpse of Soul Calibur and Ready 2 Rumble, and I think they just blew people away.
GT: How many Dreamcasts are you guys bringing into the United States for the launch?
PM: In light of our successful showing at E3, retailers have been banging on the doors for more allocations. Suffice it to say at this point, we're well poised for the biggest video platform launch in history. We have said that we expect the pre-sells to be well in excess of 200,000 units.
GT: The Japanese rollout of Dreamcast did not go as well as expected. Sega launched the unit in November and has not reached the 1 million-unit mark yet. What went wrong in Japan?
PM: Tough to say, but as an observer, it would seem that they had difficulty in recovering from the shortage of product at launch. There was a well-documented chip shortage. (NEC, the company that manufactures the graphics chip for Dreamcast, fell behind schedule.) That, of course, has been rectified. The beauty of coming into the marketplace as we are, eight or nine months behind Japan, is that all of the production problems have been resolved. The production lines are running smoothly, defectives are down enormously, and you get every benefit of having somebody else go through all the teething pains. Sega of Japan has had to do that, and I think, quite frankly, that they struggled from the initial launch. They had done a tremendous job with a very innovative TV campaign in building anticipation, and were driving people to retail, but then they couldn't fulfill demand. Sometimes that works in the favor of your competitors because people actually go out and buy a competitive product.
GT: Irimajiri (Shiochiro Irimajiri, president of Sega) has openly admitted that the new PlayStation will be more powerful than Dreamcast.
PM: If you just look at the specs; I'm not the technical guy, I'm the marketing guru. I don't know if you've compared the PlayStation 2 demonstrations to Dreamcast, but from the average consumer's perspective, you cannot see what the difference is.
GT: The new PlayStation is supposed to render 66 million polygons per second, Dreamcast does 3 million. Is 3 million polygons enough?
PM: The only thing I know is that 3 million polygons will be a reality on 9-9-99. (The Dreamcast launch date.)
GT: With the controversy surrounding video game violence, is The House of the Dead 2 going to play as large a role in your launch as you had originally planned?
PM: Quite frankly, marketing plans around specific titles are still evolving. We are seeing titles such as Soul Calibur and Ready 2 Rumble as titles that we feel will instantaneously drive hardware, and we are so impressed with the quality of these titles that we are going to place a lot of our marketing support behind them. So, in answer to your question, no decision would be made for or against The House of the Dead based upon some of the recent tragic events and the pressure that has been forthcoming from the media afterwards.
GT: Sega has made a number of super deluxe arcade games such as Top Skater and Wave Runner over the last few years. Are you going to find some way to make a Top Skater controller for Dreamcast?
PM: Top Skater is a very large arcade machine. How you get that thing into your bedroom, I'm not quite sure, but I think there are people who are far more creative than me trying to find ways to make the home experience as similar to the arcade one as they possibly can within financial reasons and limitations.
GT: But I guess my question is this. Dreamcast is very joined at the hip with the arcade experience. Does the softness, then, in the arcade industry hurt Sega and Dreamcast more than, say, Nintendo or Sony?
PM: No, because Sega's legacy in the arcade business regardless of softness is still a strength. I don't think either Sony or Nintendo, regardless of a vibrant arcade business or a soft business, have that advantage. If we're able to secure one or two arcade hits a year to Dreamcast, I think that that's an advantage that maybe our competitors don't quite have.
GT: So, it's more extra credit than base?
PM: I believe so. I believe it's become gravy for us.
