I don't think Sega's internal structural problems stem from a case of sour grapes over the 16-bit era. A more likely, and more recent, culprit may be the competitive atmosphere going into the development of the Dreamcast's hardware (Japan's design won), and it's eventual handling by Sega of America's president Peter Moore. There was a lot of internal struggling between SoA and SoJ over the Dreamcast's market strategies which were failing in Japan, but looked to be moderately successful in the US. Isao Okawa let Moore handle the Dreamcast in the west how he wanted, even though it ultimately failed, partially hamstringed by SoJ already talking about taking Sega in the 3rd party direction. Whether or not Sega survived depended on how well SoA did with the Dreamcast, and some rather obscene sales goals came down the pipe that Moore wasn't able to reach. So Moore made the call to cut the Dreamcast, and in the restructuring that followed his failure, Sega of Japan marginalized SoA and shifted most of their development and executive power back to Japan. Moore left Sega to take up a position at Microsoft overseeing the launch of the Xbox and Xbox 360.
As I understand it anyhow.
It's more of a power play than trolling. Sega doesn't want to be a Japanese company that has more pull in America & Europe than they do in Japan.and B) SoJ does various things to spite them, even if it backfires for everyone.
I think that was Nintendo. They were trying to compete with the SegaMega CD and rumors of the Saturn, so they sought out Sony to develop a CD based SNES add-on, and perhaps a new CD based console pending on that deal. Well Nintendo backed out after Sony had invested substantial amounts of capital into a prototype due to content control issues, and ended up awarding the contract to a competing line of development from Phillips (who they also backed out of a deal with). Philips was granted the right to release their hardware as the CD-i and the use of some Nintendo franchises under Nintendo's control. (like Zelda, Mah Boi!)An example would be the sony scenario. I heard that Sega had a chance to work with Sony and that Sega of America was perfectly keen on the idea but SoJ refused. This proved to be a grievous error down the line.
Sony continued with the development of the Playstation, releasing it originally with the pseudonym PSX which some oldfucks like myself still use to refer to the original Playstation. PSX was the code-name for the project Sony was building for Nintendo... so yeah... the PSX name actually was a form of sour-grapes inspired spitefulness aimed at Nintnedo.
They started as an American company selling and servicing arcade and midway machines to US Military bases in Japan post WWII. Sega's name is an amalgamation of it's original name Service Games.
Connect With Us