When it comes to console wars, it’s often pretty clear who is a winner and who isn’t. But one of the most important loses in the console wars was after the failing of the Dreamcast, which forced Sega, who had been making consoles for some time, to drop out and focus on being a software developer, of which they still are today. But that transition was no doubt hard, and so they had to do certain things to try and keep themselves afloat.
In an interview with Edge Magazine, Sega’s Toshihiro Nagoshi talked about trying to impress Nintendo to show they could be a good game partner to them:
“Compared to us, in the big picture, we are similar,” Nagoshi explained. “But in the finer details – their decision-making and timing – things are different, and I learned a lot from them. In short, it’s about objectivity. (…) It’s hard to describe, but when I’d say about some part of the game, ‘It’s okay like this, isn’t it?’ they’d say, ‘Our company does not allow this kind of thing. Ever.’ I didn’t manage to change their minds about anything. Not even once. But that’s why Nintendo has such a solid brand, even after all these years. That is why we lost the hardware war.”
“Even though we’d lost the war in the hardware market, I wanted Nintendo to see how great Sega was as a company. We made lots of characters and courses, and we did the best we could for the graphics using the best technology of the time. Even though we’d tried really hard making games for Sega hardware, they never sold too well, but F-Zero sold over 1.5 M copies worldwide. We realised the only thing we needed to admit was that Sega did not have the ability to sell hardware (laughs). That as a developer (…) we did not need to be pessimistic at all.”
Sega continues to make good games across many series, and on many consoles, so it’s clear their game was successful.
