Peter Moore isn’t all chuckles and Xboxes and EA Sports. No, he once was a big man at Sega, and got to call a lot of shots. Some of them during good times, and some, the...not so good times. Like the demise of the Dreamcast.
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.
Nope, not pleasant at all. For you, or for us. Peter Moore Interview: Part One