My point is that the launch didn't kill the Saturn.

I guess you know more than Sega of America's president, Tom Kalinske, right?

I, first of all, was a reluctantly dragged along on the Saturn launch to start with. Clearly, any time you launch a platform, you have to have adequate good software. We certainly should've learned that lesson from 32X and from other consoles, other competitors' activities. You Have to have great games. And, so, I was not in favor of the Saturn launch on that day (referring to E3 1995).

You know, I had been allowed to make decisions pretty much independent of Sega Japan up until about this point. And I was ordered to introduce Saturn immediately. The feeling by the board in Japan was that we had to get ahead of the other competitors with a 32-bit launch. We couldn't wait any longer even though we didn't have enough, or very many good games.

So, I did not want to do this. I was ordered to. So I did. And it did anger retailers. I remember... you know I had a lot of friends in retail. I spent my whole life building retail relationships with all of these guys. You know, I was very good friends with the senior management of almost every retailer in America. And I remember a very close friend at KB who was so mad at me I think he's still mad at me today. You know, he was offended that we would only... because we didn't have enough quantity of these either, so we were only shipping Toys 'R' Us and uh... I forgot... not a Best Buy, but one of the independent...

So, you know, we offended the 'retail America' greatly through this strategy and it was not a smart thing to do in my opinion.