Recently, I met Peter Moore, ex-head of Sega of America, ex-head of Xbox, now President of EA Sports. I was interviewing him for Esquire magazine (you can see that feature in the October issue), but there was a lot of stuff I couldn't fit in. We talked for two hours about his entire career, about his highs and lows, and about some of the key controversies of the console wars.

Over the next five days, I'm running the best of that frank and illuminating discussion, starting with Moore's early days in the States and his move to Sega...



So let's go right back to the beginning. You graduated from a physical education college and went out to the States to teach soccer. What happened next?

I needed a real job. I got a job for Patrick, the French football shoe company, and I became a sales rep in Southern California. I covered the area from the Mexican border all the way up to Bakersfield - which is a massive geographical expanse – in a Toyota Camry with a shoe bag. I moved up to San Francisco in the mid-eighties, and then I became president of Patrick in 1988. I was 11 years in total at Patrick, then I went to Reebok, to get them into worldwide sports with the focus on soccer. Reebok was in Boston: great city, awful winters – I wanted to get back to the West Coast, and that's how I got into videogames.

A recruiter called me and said 'what do you know about videogames? Do you know Sega and have you ever heard of the Dreamcast?' and I replied 'Not much, yes I have and no, I haven't'. So we moved back to the Bay Area of San Francisco where Sega's based.

What do you think Sega saw in your work at Reebok?

I started at Reebok as Director of Global Sports – I was identified as someone who could globalize Reebok. I ended up as Senior Vice-President of Global Sports Marketing in the early years when we got Ryan Giggs, Dennis Bergkamp and Andy Cole. I signed Liverpool – which was a great moment for me as a Scouser.

The Dreamcast was an interesting beast. Sega was so financially strapped, and it had already launched in Japan to a sort of tepid, luke-warm reaction. These are big stakes games. I mean, when you're launching a games console, you need hundreds of millions of dollars to get it off the ground… and so the North American launch was the last best chance – Europe was going to be launching but there wasn't enough there to salvage what was going to be a tough situation with the PS2 looming 12 months out … The US was the last best chance of getting the Dreamcast up and running.

We amassed a very strong line up of titles, but unfortunately, EA - God bless 'em – decided they weren't going to publish on Dreamcast. That forced me to build my own sports brand, called 2K – we came up with the name one night, because it was the Y2K period, we needed to get the packaging done and we couldn't come up with a name. So we just said, 'let's call it 2K sports'. It was the best we could come up with.

Dreamcast was a phenomenal 18 months of pain, heartache, euphoria… We thought we had it, but then Playstation came out, that infamous issue of Newsweek with the Emotion Engine on the cover… and of course, EA didn't publish which left a big hole, not only in sports but in other genres. We ended up that Christmas period not being able to get to where we needed to be – we weren't far short, we just couldn't get that critical mass…

It seemed that the European office weren't as confident as the American office…

We [Sega of America] knew we could win. It was just indicative of the complete lack of integration – the Dreamcast logo was blue in Europe instead of orange, the concept of a globalised brand, which we're now building here at EA Sports, just evaded the Japanese completely. And JF, who was the general manager in Europe, went his own way, had his own positioning. We had a very different positioning, we were very aggressive in the US – and it was a little challenging in Europe. There wasn't that, 'let's go and get them, we can win this battle'.

You know, I loved the console wars and still do even though I'm no longer in the console business… the idea of being upfront, getting after Phil Harrison, getting after Kaz Hirai and then later getting after John Riccitiello… I think the consumer loves it, it adds publicity and it adds fire around the industry. And in those days we needed to because we didn't have the money …

In the end it didn't work out. It was tough, but those were great days and I've never met anybody who regretted buying a Dreamcast. Soul Calibur anyone? We had a lot of content, a lot of fun and we had tremendous PR, and we got after it in a unique way – the 'Its thinking' campaign was a great campaign, we had these wacky 15-second spots on MTV, we launched on 9.9.99 at the MTV Music Awards, we hit the road with Linkin Park and Limp Bizkit of all people; the Family Values and Anger Management tours – we were a big brand.

But then it all went pear-shaped in Christmas 2000.



Okay, but let's go back to the hopeful years. You said you didn't have much money or much time, but you certainly seemed to make an impact.

Oh yeah. I mean, I arrived in February and we were launching in September, so I had seven months to figure out, a) what the industry was and b) what the console and software were, and then build a marketing campaign. Which we did by April. In 60 days we came up with 'It's Thinking'. We filmed a huge ad spot in Vancouver, we went ten nights and did Apocalypse, a multimillion dollar TV spot (by ad firm Foote, Cone and Belding). It was this idea that the console was actually thinking, and it was bringing 747s down, it had this Black Rain-style look. We only ran that spot once on 9.9.99 during the video music awards and it became very viral - this is obviously a long time before YouTube.

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.

So on January 31 2001 we said Sega is leaving hardware – somehow I got to make that call, not the Japanese. I had to fire a lot of people, it was not a pleasant day.

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. It was a big stakes game. Sega had the option of pouring in more money and going bankrupt and they decided they wanted to live to fight another day. So we licked our wounds, ate some humble pie and went to Sony and Nintendo to ask for dev kits.

Actually, the only company that ever called was Microsoft and that became my link with the company, because of the respect I had for Robbie Bach. Xbox had launched, I was onstage with Robbie, I was the only third-party who'd go on stage with Microsoft at E3 - at that time people were saying Microsoft couldn't get it done, but I believed they could, because I believed in online. I always thought that online was going to be the key. And the line I came up with was, 'we're taking games where gaming is going'. Everybody laughed because we had Seganet going with just 50,000 people online… but I always think Dreamcast was the precursor to the next-gen consoles, because we then brought out a broadband adaptor – remember playing Quake 3 through Broadband? Only 5% of people had broadband in those days – it sounds like it was a hundred years ago, but it was 2001!

The first real multiplayer console game was NBA 2K1. I always remember when we launched Seganet. We were in some nightclub in Hollywood, and we'd just had the band Filter onstage, which brought the house down. I played against Ice Cube. I was crapping myself because we had to dial the frickin' modem to connect to San Francisco. And it worked. Those were seat of the pants moments, the fact that you had to get a dial-up telephone modem to work, and then we were doing a satellite video feed down from Visual Concepts… it was a wild night, I don't remember much after that. That was the first time anyone had seen an online console game.