Battle of the bands
After a night of hot SEGA announcements at The Game Awards, the company’s newly-appointed president and COO, Shuji Utsumi, sat down with Eurogamer to talk about his plans for the future.
The chat covered all things from Utsumi’s previous work with SEGA and the upcoming line of revival projects, to the announcements from The Game Awards themselves. And, naturally, there was a little dig thrown in at Nintendo for good measure — albeit, a pretty friendly one.
When discussing the number of SEGA franchises that have been left dormant over the years, Utsumi began to reflect on how they came to be in the first place. “Sega’s role was to invent rock & roll,” the company president stated, “compared to Nintendo. Nintendo’s like pop music, good music, jazz…”.
It’s a comparison that maybe isn’t all that far off — the attitude of, say, the “Genesis does what Nintendon’t” marketing campaign is certainly more rock and roll than Nintendo’s comparatively vanilla “Play it Loud!” one — but it’s funny to hear the newly-appointed exec. make such a comparison all these years on. Come on, who’d rather be described as “Pop music” over rock and roll?
It’s this old-school SEGA bite — or, as Utsumi summarises the approach, “‘If you have attitude, Sega’s the company for you, rather than Nintendo'” — that the company president hopes to bring back with its new and upcoming releases. “We have such beautiful content value in Sega, and some other IPs, so we’re trying to revive it with a little bit of the flavour of hip-hop now.”
Classic rock and roll with a dash of hip-hop thrown in for good measure, eh? Sounds like a pretty catchy mix.
And how’s it doing this? With a bunch of revivals, a new Sonic Racing gameanother Virtua Fighter and even more Yakuza. Hmmlet’s see what’s coming out of the “pop” scene first before we decide which playlist to load up.
What do you make of this comparison? A subtle dig or a pretty spot-on description? Play it loud in the comments.
Jim came to Nintendo Life in 2022 and, despite his insistence that The Minish Cap is the best Zelda game and his unwavering love for the Star Wars prequels (yes, really), he has continued to write news and features on the site ever since.