David Rosenthal: preference

Transcript context

…This is insufficient. Everything you say is exactly correct. The funny thing is, though, that listeners, for you all listening, I bet most of you, if you knew any version of the story of the death of Sega, what we just told was the version you probably know. While it's not wrong, it's only one version of the story. The other version is both way more charitable to Sega, the parent company in Japan, and also I think way more interesting in terms of lessons we can take from it, so let's tell it. If you go listen to our two-part Nintendo saga, we talked quite a bit about Sega along the way, and especially in our first Nintendo episode. When we talked about Sega, we talked about them as this arcade company. That's actually what Sega was. The home console business, the Genesis, the Master System before it, these were side project offshoots from what was otherwise an enormous and very successful arcade business based back in Japan. Totally. It started as service games back in the 40s, 50s, this merger of arcade game makers and arcade distributors. You even had the story that you were telling. I think we actually cut this from the Nintendo episode for a time. But on Periscope, the very innovative Sega game, they standardized the unit of the quarter as what you pay for an arcade video game session.…

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