The second part of Keith Stuart’s interview with Peter Moore:

Peter Moore thought he could win the console war with Dreamcast. He was wrong. Sony’s ingenious PR foiled his plans, but for Moore, this was just the beginning. Part Two of our interview, takes him from the collapse of Dreamcast to the heights of Microsoft’s ambitions for Xbox – ambitions that could well have destroyed the Nintendo we know today…

Keith Stuart: What was the key lesson you took out of the failure of Dreamcast?
Peter Moore: You know, failure’s a tough word! It didn’t quite get there. I was angry with Sony at the time, but in their shoes I probably would have done the same thing. They did a tremendous job – and it’s a story they repeated in 2005 with Killzone – where they promised the consumer something they probably believed they were going to deliver, but they never did. PlayStation 2 – it was the emotion engine it was games coming to life, Real Player was going to be on there, a full network browser… and they just never delivered.

But what they did was place doubt in the consumers’ mind. It was pre-emptive guerrilla PR, in the same way that three E3s ago I got lambasted for what I did with Xbox for 360, because I was determined we were going to show real footage even if it was alpha or beta. And then Sony came up with that Killzone video – and they still haven’t shipped the game! Have you seen the video?! The game will never be the video! But what they did again was they placed doubt. I mean it’s a classic PR tactic.

Stuart: So going back to Dreamcast vs PS2, you felt the impetus slipping away…
Moore: It was a horrible period because, all of a sudden, you could sense consumers thinking twice about Dreamcast. I was $199, it was the first online console, we had some great games – SoulCalibur, Sonic Adventure, Trickstyle, Ready 2 Rumble. When you look at them today, you chuckle, but they were on the cutting edge graphically at that time…

But [Sony] were brilliant at FUD – you know, fear uncertainty and doubt. It was a massive FUD campaign. The consumer thought twice and they started to read, ‘can the Dreamcast make it?’ It had a tough time in Europe, it had a really disastrous time in Japan. My job was… my personality was such that I’ll go up and start being a little more on the front foot… It was like, ‘well, what do you do?’ You just do it yourself. You start talking, you don’t wait for the Japanese to give you messaging – because PR is something they don’t do very well, they just don’t do that concept of messaging and having passion around the message – the only thing we could do was be passionate. But it was too little too late unfortunately.

Stuart: So you were at Sega for another two years after that…
Moore: Yeah, my job was to transition the company from being a hardware company, which it had been for two decades, and off I go to Nintendo and Sony…

Stuart: Was that a difficult time?
Moore: It was not optimistic. We had developers, Yuji Naka, Yu Suzuki, all these people who had never worked on anything other than first-party hardware. And now we’re saying you need to go multi-platform, and it was just not comfortable for them whatsoever. You don’t just one day say ‘well we’re just going to go from our Dreamcast dev kits to our PS2 or Xbox.’ Microsoft set up a deal for us and we started to work on things like Crazy Taxi and bringing them over to Xbox – we did I think an 11 title deal.

Stuart: And in the end you fell out with your bosses in Japan, because they were still relying on arcade conversions when the rest of the world was playing GTA. But how did this lead to your arrival at Microsoft?
Moore: Robbie Bach called me to wish me a merry Christmas and asked how I was doing. I said I’m not too good, I’m fed up of trying to convince Japan that we need to either go off and hire western developers or really change what we’re publishing and developing in Japan, because the western world is really starting to take over, and the Japanese deve

Robbie Bach called me to wish me a merry Christmas and asked how I was doing. I said I’m not too good, I’m fed up of trying to convince Japan that we need to either go off and hire western developers or really change what we’re publishing and developing in Japan, because the western world is really starting to take over, and the Japanese developers were being marginalized. And Robbie said well if you would ever consider coming here, there’s a home for you at Microsoft.

So in January (2003) I flew up there and had lunch with Steve Ballmer and you don’t say no to Ballmer. We had a great lunch and he convinced me that Microsoft was going to take on Sony; so I get to put on my suit of armour, get on my horse and take on Sony again – but with a little bit more money this time! And I said yes.

Read the full article at guardian.co.uk

Discuss on our forum!