Behind every product there is usually a person. Media personality who is responsible for him and his success. Some people don’t even think about how difficult it is to be responsible for an entire brand. Organize the work of studios, negotiate with third-party developers, come up with advertising, a distinctive feature of the product, create a development path for the years ahead and have charisma.

In our beloved gaming industry there were several such managers, remembered for their good and not so good deeds. Let’s remember together.

Nolan Bushnell

You need to start from the beginning and from one of the first game consoles. If you read one of my blogs, you know that Nolan was not the first. However, it was he who was the first manager who actively showed himself. He not only generated ideas and counted money, but also organized the work of the entire Atari. Bushnell was an ideologue with fire in his eyes.

Among his merits are laying the first foundations for the promotion and development of the industry. Nolan understood that just a good idea and saving on everything would not bring anything good, and you need to learn from failures. It seems simple, but even with such things many have failed.

Pong grew out of working out bugs on Computer Space. Other slot machines appeared only due to the understanding that the industry needs creative developers with a different approach to video games. Portable Pong and the Atari 2600 were the result of the pursuit of innovation and understanding of the market. They didn’t fail only because Nolan knew why people needed to buy them, correctly explaining and demonstrating everything through aggressive advertising. The variety of games on the Atari 2600 was an equally important factor in its success.

His leadership ended in 1979 for two reasons. First, Nolan sold Atari to Warner Communications, who didn’t like the way he was doing business. Secondly, he just burned out.

Unfortunately, due to the simplicity of these ideas, the low media exposure of Bushnell himself and the rather short reign at Atari, there is nothing more to say about him. But he will remain the person who truly understood how to run a company that produces gaming devices, and, one might say, laid the foundations.

Tom Kalinsky

Kalinske knew nothing about video games, but he was a sales and marketing genius. First he worked at Mattel, where in the mid-1980s he revived the Barbie and Hot Wheels brands, which no one believed in anymore. The company became as profitable as before for the first time in many years.

Sega hired him to save the Mega Drive/Genesis from oblivion in the US, giving him free reign with one demand – make the Genesis the most popular console.

Tom, without hesitation, analyzed the market situation, looked at the company’s games and went to Sega’s headquarters in Japan. At the office, he came to the decision room, where the entire top of the company and the head of Nakayami Sano were sitting. Tom suggested four steps:

Make games specifically for the Americas region. Develop more games based on popular film, cartoon and TV series franchises in the United States

Included with the console is not Altered Beast, but Sonic the Hedgehog . Thus making the new SEGA mascot a direct competitor to Mario

The Japanese talked for a while. Nakayami https://sportsbettingmedia.co.uk/latest-news/sports-betting-app-ios-android was simply furious. He got up and left the room. But, stopping at the door, he said to Tom: “When I hired you, I promised that you would freely make decisions in the American branch of the company, so you can go and do what you suggested to us.”.

It was a victory. Genesis sales soar. Sonic quickly became the most popular character in the US, overtaking Mickey Mouse and Mario, and the games were praised by players and critics. Advertising made Sega cool in the mass consciousness of people. She looked more mature and daring, unlike her competitor. It was under him that blast processing was invented. A loud name for a distinctive feature of Genesis, which in reality was a dummy, but it bore fruit. So much so that some people still believe it.

It was only after a while that the Japanese began to put a spoke in the wheels of the American unit, and all because of panic and money, because there was less money from Japan than from the USA. The latter seemed to understand more how to work with their market, and the former lost all confidence in Kalinsky and the entire branch. During the development of the CD add-on, prototypes were not sent to the USA for fear that information would be leaked to competitors (I DID NOT IMAGINE ANYTHING, THIS IS THE TRUE). In addition, when the Saturn was being developed, there was a choice of two hardware companies: Silicon Graphics and Sony. Tom insisted on the first ones, but he was ignored. They subsequently made the filling of the N64, which was more powerful than the PlayStation and Saturn. Sony was rejected first of all because of inexperience, and secondly because of Kalinsky’s close relationship with American Sony, so fuck him. He also criticized the decision to release Saturn early.

As a result, Tom was simply tired of the constant set-ups from the main office and voluntarily resigned in 1996. And don’t think that he was a holy martyr. He was often criticized for his “Quantity over Quality” approach. The Genesis has a large library of great games, but there was no less outright slag.

Bernie Stolar

In 1985, Bernie was hired by Atari to promote arcade machines. In 1991, he was put in charge of the development of the portable Atari Lynx.

In 1995, he became one of the founders of the American branch of Sony, where he began to manage the entire PlayStation. The console is going to be released the same year. Stolar comes to E3, where he defeats Sega with just one word.

It also launched the launch lineup of games: Crash Bandicoot, Ridge Racer, Spyro: The Dragon and Battle Arena Toshinden . All this has taken the PlayStation to incredible heights, leaving the Saturn and N64 far behind. However, he was against JRPG releases, believing that they could not show the full power and capabilities of the console.

In 1996, he was lured away by Sega to promote the Dreamcast. Bernie always conducted himself professionally at all exhibitions and interviews, answering questions confidently and clearly. This convinced everyone that Sega was doing the right thing. He also personally negotiated with developers and publishers to develop games for the company’s latest console, which he did very well until it came to EA, who wanted a reduced commission. It was not possible to reach an agreement,. To. before that, on Stolar’s ​​initiative, Visual Concepts, which developed sports games, was purchased, and Elektroniki wanted to be the only developers of sports sims on the console.

His tenure at SEGA ended in 1999, when he announced at E3 that the DreamCast would cost $299, $50 less than SEGA bosses wanted. Bernie explained this by saying that he wanted to increase sales of the console and make a good impression of the company. As a result, he was fired, for which he received 5 million compensation.

After that, for a long time, I visited different companies. From Mattel to ZOOM, where he worked until 2022. On June 22, 2022, Stolar died at the age of 75. Various former colleagues spoke of him as a reserved, calm gentleman who did not turn up his nose and was an excellent mentor.

Peter Moore

Moore worked in marketing at Reebok. In the late 1990s, he was personally hired by Bernie Stolar. When Bernie was fired in 1999, Peter was put in his place. The Sega console was already breathing well in 2000. Moore, realizing that DreamCast could not be saved, called on the Japanese to stop supporting and surrender, so as not to lose even more money, which was almost gone.

In 2001, Sega ceased production of the console. Peter works for two more years at the company, where he tries to convey to conservative management that the world has changed and it is necessary to completely change the structure and approach to the development and publishing of video games. However, the authorities turned a deaf ear.

In 2003, he was hired by Microsoft to promote the first Xbox. Moore is immediately inspired and begins to actively promote the “Most Powerful Console”. Many people remember his loud statements about the sequel to “The Greatest Game in History” Halo 2, which he tattooed on his shoulder. It is from here that one can observe his strategy of presenting new releases on the console with pomp, endlessly praising and elevating the game to its absolute level. And thanks to old connections at Sega, I was able to negotiate exclusivity for several projects.

37:00. I recommend watching his speech in full

A new milestone was the work on the Xbox 360. Microsoft pursued one goal – to destroy the PlayStation, and in a sense, gave Peter a free hand. Loud game announcements, a marketing strategy aimed at mocking PlayStation, working with Japanese studios.

Despite all this, there was one problem – the X-boxes burned one after another. Moore did not admit the problem until recently, blaming everything on a standard factory defect. He focused all the attention of the audience on the future, the Arcade and Elite versions, which supposedly were no longer on fire.

Peter retired from Microsoft in 2007. Wanting to spend more time with his family, he left the company and then took a job at EA, essentially trading places with the man who would destroy the entire Xbox brand.

Don Mattrick

Don has worked at EA since 1991, where he excelled as a producer of many video games, raising the company’s greatness.

In the early 2000s, he refused to cooperate with Microsoft on the Xbox, fearing that the console would not work and that EA would waste time and effort. This is largely due to the failed 3DO, into which electronics engineers invested a lot of money and effort. By 2004, cooperation was finally established. At E3, he and Peter announce several EA projects on Xbox against the backdrop of sports stars. At the next E3, Mattrick announced more than 35 games for the new Xbox 360 and rejoiced on behalf of the entire company for the excellent cooperation between the two corporations. Left EA in 2005.

He was already hired by Microsoft in 2007. We can say that he simply went with the flow, increased the number of Xbox Live subscriptions, expanded the Arcade tab, popularized DLC. But he was haunted by the casual audience of the Wii, so it was decided to release the Kinect, which sold well, but ultimately turned out to be useless. From this moment on (since 2009), a bolt was put on regular gaming. The casual direction was put at the forefront of everything. There were almost no high-profile releases, favorite series were coming to an end, and nothing new came to replace them. At the same time, many studios were dissolved.

At the nextgen presentation everything went according to Don’s plan, but not according to the company’s plan. While preparing the Xbox One, Mattrick, recalling the “successful” experience with Kinect, decided to attract not only gamers and casuals to the console, but also those who did not care about games. This is how the idea was born to make a combine for watching television out of a multimedia console.

Hence the poor performance, the high price, the lack of backward compatibility, the inability to share disks, and the all-seeing eye of Kinect. He also owns the following statement:

If you want backwards compatibility, then you’re thinking backwards. (Sounds better in the original)

Don Mattrick

By the time the new generation came out, Don left Microsoft, leaving the new leader to sort out the truckload of problems. And we all know him very well. Let’s get together.