Dreamcast: It (was) thinking

The Guardian has a pretty cool interview up with Peter Moore, president of EA Sports. Back in the day, he was head of Sega of America. In fact, he was the guy who killed the Dreamcast.

As awesome as the Dreamcast was, maybe it’s a good thing it died; it served its purpose. It helped usher in the next-gen era of console gaming by supporting broadband capabilities. It could even be argued that they forged the casual gaming space with games like Samba de Amiga and whatever-the-hell that Leonard Nimoy fish game was called. Oh yeah, Seaman. Anyways, I have a hard enough time choosing between the 3 current consoles, I don’t need a fourth cluttering up my mind.

Perhaps it’s not fair to blame Peter Moore for the death of the Dreamcast anyways. He was probably just the triggerman. In fact, even though the Dreamcast was a success, it wasn’t enough of a success to justify continued production:

“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 – and I can’t remember the exact figures – but we had to make N hundreds of millions of dollars by the holiday season and shift N millions of units of hardware, otherwise we just couldn’t sustain the business.”

The interview makes for an interesting read about the early days of the console wars. Make sure you make it to the end, where he talks about playing NBA 2K1 with Ice Cube and reveals that even he wasn’t too sure about the modem actually working. Ah, the early days of the console wars.