Throughout much of the 1990s, Sonic the Hedgehog was one of the pillars of console gaming, briefly rivalling Mario as a mascot of the industry. Sadly, these days Sonic often seems to be playing second fiddle to Mario in low effort sports match-ups like the above pictured Mario & Sonic at the Sochi 2014 Olympic Winter Games.

While the Sega Genesis (also called Sega Megadrive) never really managed to compete with the Super Nintendo in Japan, it enjoyed massive success in the US, and a large portion of that success has been credited to former Sega of America President Tom Kalinske, who led the company’s US division from 1990 through 1996.

Kalinske recently spoke on the /r/retrogaming podcast about his experience in the so-called “console wars” of the ’90s, including the struggle with convincing Sega of Japan (SOJ) to consider the sensibilities of non-Japanese consumers.

“Sonic was originally much more aggressive looking,” Kalinske said. “[Sonic] had fangs, the spikes were extremely sharp, he was much more angular, he had this busty girlfriend named Madonna—we couldn’t have gotten away with that I don’t think—and he had a rock band. So we asked [SOJ] to get rid of the rock band and Madonna and to obviously make him not have huge fangs … to make him cooler.”

He added, “Basically what I said was we want him to be the smartass almost-teenager that everybody really loves even though he gets away with murder half of the time.”

Kalinske explained that his counterparts at Sega of Japan were completely against his suggestions, but they were ultimately overruled by then-President Hayao Nakayama.

“After Nakayama heard both sides of the discussion – how the SOJ guys didn’t want to change the character, and they wanted to keep Madonna, and they wanted to keep the band – Nakayama put his fist down and said, ‘No, we’re going to do what Sega of America wants to do, what Tom wants to do.”

Conflicts with Sega of Japan

While Sonic enjoyed enormous success, especially in the US, Kalinske explained that feelings of animosity began to form among the SOJ middle management, and he believes that had he understood what was going on at the time, he may have made a greater effort to prevent the relationship from deteriorating.

“What I now understand happened is every Monday morning Nakayama would walk into the decision room, where the middle management and senior management of the company is, and beat the hell out of everybody about ‘How come you’re not as successful as they are in the United States or for that matter as they are in UK?’ And you know after a while, every Monday you get yelled at and tables pounded in front of you and you’re told how stupid you are, you start to really dislike these people who are being successful. That didn’t occur to me.”

According to Kalinske, several of the middle managers who had developed an animosity toward Sega of America were later promoted within the company, and that led to problems for the US team down the line. Kalinske found it harder and harder to get his Japanese colleagues to listen to his suggestions, and eventually he was cut out entirely.

Sega drops out of the console wars

While Kalinske cites the sour relationship between Sega’s Japanese and American branches as a failure for the company, he believes that the root cause of Sega’s eventual shift away from video games was more complicated, and was likely heavily influenced by the company’s merger with gambling machine manufacturer Sammy Corp.

“After the Sega-Sammy merger, the Sammy part of the business was so profitable … that part of the business starting being so important, and the video game part of the business became less important,” Kalinske said. “It was easy to see why the then-new management of Sega, which was largely from the Sammy company, Satomi-san and his son, would not pay as much attention to the video game business.”

This story sounds remarkably similar to what is currently happening at Konami Corp, the Japanese game publisher behind the Metal Gear and Silent Hill franchises, which is currently shifting away from AAA titles to focus on mobile games as well as its own gambling machine business.

Kalinske admitted that he did not understand why Sega has since moved so far from the company it had been in the ’90s, saying, “Even if you get out of the hardware business, there’s so much great Sega IP that you could have remained a powerful publisher on other platforms … I just don’t understand it. I don’t understand why they walked away from the market and all this great IP they have.”

While Kalinske spent a great deal of time on the podcast talking about his experiences at Sega, he also talked about his involvement in the creation of what would later become the Entertainment Software Ratings Board (ESRB), his investments in educational technology, and more. You can listen to the full podcast on SoundCloud.

Image courtesy of Nintendo Co Ltd