MegaDrive20XX
Segatron Genesis... call me the wizard.
Tom Kalinske joins Sega (1990)
When the Sega Genesis was released in 1989, Sega of America (SOA) had an uphill battle to face, just like the Japan side had with the Mega Drive. Nintendo's NES console had swiftly dominated the home videogame industry, becoming almost literally the only game in town. Meanwhile, Sega still had but a single-digit percentage of the market. The mandate from HQ in Japan was to get one million Genesis systems sold in the first six months. Michael Katz, then CEO of SOA, had done the best he could, but only managed about half that figure in those first months. Sega's Japanese board of directors weren't satisfied, and Katz was let go in 1990. Hayao Nakayama, then head of Sega Enterprises in Japan, needed someone new to guide SOA.
That someone was Tom Kalinske, who at the time was steering the ship at Mattel. Kalinske had known Nakayama personally from working with him at Paramount, so getting the CEO wasn't too tough. After some time studying the game market, Kalinske went to Nakayama and the rest of Sega's board to give his thoughts on what could be done better with the Genesis. First of all, he didn't like that Sega was selling the system for $189.99, which was not exactly a steal in 1990. Kalinske wanted to cut that by at least 40 dollars. Furthermore, he wanted broader acceptance of the Genesis throughout the country, and he felt that SOA wasn't going to achieve that by continuing to include Altered Beast with the system -- sure, it looked badass and helped Sega win the hearts of teenage boys, but it wasn't exactly family-friendly, and there were other games coming down the pipeline that could just as easily represent the power of the Genesis without potentially alienating anybody.
At the front of the pipeline was Sonic the Hedgehog. From day one of development, Sonic was manufactured to be a hit; being carefully smoothed over to make it as high-quality as one of Nintendo's Super Mario games, but featuring enough unique 16-bit qualities to push Sega ahead of their rival. Once he saw the game, Kalinske believed in Sonic just as much as the rest of Sega -- so much so that he wanted it as the new pack-in to replace Altered Beast.
After presenting his plans, Kalinske was immediately met with resistance from the Japanese side, but Nakayama had the final say, and let Kalinske do his work, since he was hired to help out the American side, after all. Before long, the price of the Genesis dropped, and in 1991, Sonic was released as an individual game and not much later as the new pack-in, becoming the biggest success story in Sega's history. Not to mention that the Genesis did reach that magic one-million-sold mark.
Kalinske's job was more than just configuring prices and pack-ins -- he also had to rework SOA's overall marketing strategy. Michael Katz had greenlighted the previous Genesis marketing campaign, "Genesis Does What Nintendon't," which was a good first step towards what Kalinske wanted to do: be more aggressive. Tell gamers that the Genesis is and will always be the best thing around, and that Nintendo will just putt along. SOA came up with "Welcome to the Next Level," the slogan in front of all of Sega's ads for the next few years. They were clever, funny ads, written with a casual tone, and with those were the TV ads that used biting, alternative humor (the classic example being the Game Gear "squirrel" commercial ). All of this punctuated by the classic "Sega scream."
Kalinske continued to try to keep the Genesis in the ring, especially once Nintendo launched their own 16-bit machine, the Super NES. With subsequent key Sega titles -- Ecco the Dolphin, Streets of Rage 2, Sonic 2, and so on -- plus bestselling third-party games alongside those, SOA was able to position the Genesis as the system that was doing newer, better stuff than Nintendo was. While that's arguable (like any ad!), the reality is that SOA was gaining market share, and, just as importantly, mindshare. Kalinske was making it work, and that's why he got so much attention, and still does: the fact that any company in the early '90s got as close to -- and for a period surpassed -- Nintendo in the market was unthinkably impressive.
Unfortunately, as the years went on, the Genesis got longer in the tooth, "thanks" in part to a campaign from Nintendo that closely followed Sega's edgy ads and put them on top of the 1994 holiday season. Regardless of that, though, SOA had always been performing better than the Japan side, and that no doubt bred some resentment. The authority of the Japanese became more pronounced by 1995, and with the impending American launch of the 32-bit Saturn, Nakayama wanted the plug pulled on the Genesis beforehand.16-bit software output slowed to a crawl, yet the Genesis was still making money well into 1996. So why get rid of a good thing? (Perhaps the failures of the Sega CD and 32X clouded Nakayama's judgment.) Kalinske was quickly rendered powerless, and after a botched surprise Saturn launch (released in May 1995 despite months of hype for "Saturnday" in September), it wasn't long before he resigned in 1996.
It's an interesting series of events, but pretty endemic of the fact that business really can be personal. If Sega had been a big, happy, successful family, who knows how much longer they would have held out in the hardware business, and how many mistakes wouldn't have been followed through on. Tom Kalinske might have held out longer, too.
http://www.1up.com/1upblogs/3/1ups_retro_gaming_blog <-- source
Mega's 2 cents:
This was the man who made Sega family friendly, made sure Sonic was bundled with the Genesis, and gave it the aggressive edge back then. Oh and the classic, "SEGA SCREAM"
When the Sega Genesis was released in 1989, Sega of America (SOA) had an uphill battle to face, just like the Japan side had with the Mega Drive. Nintendo's NES console had swiftly dominated the home videogame industry, becoming almost literally the only game in town. Meanwhile, Sega still had but a single-digit percentage of the market. The mandate from HQ in Japan was to get one million Genesis systems sold in the first six months. Michael Katz, then CEO of SOA, had done the best he could, but only managed about half that figure in those first months. Sega's Japanese board of directors weren't satisfied, and Katz was let go in 1990. Hayao Nakayama, then head of Sega Enterprises in Japan, needed someone new to guide SOA.
That someone was Tom Kalinske, who at the time was steering the ship at Mattel. Kalinske had known Nakayama personally from working with him at Paramount, so getting the CEO wasn't too tough. After some time studying the game market, Kalinske went to Nakayama and the rest of Sega's board to give his thoughts on what could be done better with the Genesis. First of all, he didn't like that Sega was selling the system for $189.99, which was not exactly a steal in 1990. Kalinske wanted to cut that by at least 40 dollars. Furthermore, he wanted broader acceptance of the Genesis throughout the country, and he felt that SOA wasn't going to achieve that by continuing to include Altered Beast with the system -- sure, it looked badass and helped Sega win the hearts of teenage boys, but it wasn't exactly family-friendly, and there were other games coming down the pipeline that could just as easily represent the power of the Genesis without potentially alienating anybody.
At the front of the pipeline was Sonic the Hedgehog. From day one of development, Sonic was manufactured to be a hit; being carefully smoothed over to make it as high-quality as one of Nintendo's Super Mario games, but featuring enough unique 16-bit qualities to push Sega ahead of their rival. Once he saw the game, Kalinske believed in Sonic just as much as the rest of Sega -- so much so that he wanted it as the new pack-in to replace Altered Beast.
After presenting his plans, Kalinske was immediately met with resistance from the Japanese side, but Nakayama had the final say, and let Kalinske do his work, since he was hired to help out the American side, after all. Before long, the price of the Genesis dropped, and in 1991, Sonic was released as an individual game and not much later as the new pack-in, becoming the biggest success story in Sega's history. Not to mention that the Genesis did reach that magic one-million-sold mark.
Kalinske's job was more than just configuring prices and pack-ins -- he also had to rework SOA's overall marketing strategy. Michael Katz had greenlighted the previous Genesis marketing campaign, "Genesis Does What Nintendon't," which was a good first step towards what Kalinske wanted to do: be more aggressive. Tell gamers that the Genesis is and will always be the best thing around, and that Nintendo will just putt along. SOA came up with "Welcome to the Next Level," the slogan in front of all of Sega's ads for the next few years. They were clever, funny ads, written with a casual tone, and with those were the TV ads that used biting, alternative humor (the classic example being the Game Gear "squirrel" commercial ). All of this punctuated by the classic "Sega scream."
Kalinske continued to try to keep the Genesis in the ring, especially once Nintendo launched their own 16-bit machine, the Super NES. With subsequent key Sega titles -- Ecco the Dolphin, Streets of Rage 2, Sonic 2, and so on -- plus bestselling third-party games alongside those, SOA was able to position the Genesis as the system that was doing newer, better stuff than Nintendo was. While that's arguable (like any ad!), the reality is that SOA was gaining market share, and, just as importantly, mindshare. Kalinske was making it work, and that's why he got so much attention, and still does: the fact that any company in the early '90s got as close to -- and for a period surpassed -- Nintendo in the market was unthinkably impressive.
Unfortunately, as the years went on, the Genesis got longer in the tooth, "thanks" in part to a campaign from Nintendo that closely followed Sega's edgy ads and put them on top of the 1994 holiday season. Regardless of that, though, SOA had always been performing better than the Japan side, and that no doubt bred some resentment. The authority of the Japanese became more pronounced by 1995, and with the impending American launch of the 32-bit Saturn, Nakayama wanted the plug pulled on the Genesis beforehand.16-bit software output slowed to a crawl, yet the Genesis was still making money well into 1996. So why get rid of a good thing? (Perhaps the failures of the Sega CD and 32X clouded Nakayama's judgment.) Kalinske was quickly rendered powerless, and after a botched surprise Saturn launch (released in May 1995 despite months of hype for "Saturnday" in September), it wasn't long before he resigned in 1996.
It's an interesting series of events, but pretty endemic of the fact that business really can be personal. If Sega had been a big, happy, successful family, who knows how much longer they would have held out in the hardware business, and how many mistakes wouldn't have been followed through on. Tom Kalinske might have held out longer, too.
http://www.1up.com/1upblogs/3/1ups_retro_gaming_blog <-- source
Mega's 2 cents:
This was the man who made Sega family friendly, made sure Sonic was bundled with the Genesis, and gave it the aggressive edge back then. Oh and the classic, "SEGA SCREAM"