Ben Gilbert: belief

Transcript context

…Yeah. This is a good spot to transition to analysis here. I think there's a couple of interesting things to talk about in the playbook, and then we have a fun way to end the episode. One of the things I want to talk about is, despite all of these machinations and mistakes, they do have some pretty great IP in the company. The Sonic movie, it's no Mario movie, but it did pretty well. People still love Sonic the Hedgehog. The Yakuza franchise is strong. There are lots of other franchises within Sega. Is there almost, I'm wondering, an LVMH, Bernard Arnault style takeover opportunity here? Could you come and acquire either the whole Sega Sammy company or the Sega IP out of it and do it right? There's so much more that could be done with this stuff. I don't think so. My take on this whole thing is that Sonic was a one trick pony, and that they never really found an effective way to expand the franchise. They came out with a bunch more stuff that had Sonic on it, but I never wanted to play 3D Sonic the way that I wanted to play the original Sonic the Hedgehog side scroller game. It feels to me like there's a lot of nostalgia to play with, but it didn't really create any durable extensible IP or gameplay, frankly. Right. Back to the difference between Sega, Nintendo, the games, and the difference between Miyamoto and Sonic Team. Sega's DNA—this is the whole point of this episode—it was the arcades. The type of game you make for an arcade is very different from the type of game you make for a $60 packaged good home console. Sonic was the perfect arcade style game. That first level in the first Sonic was so good. Even the subsequent 3D stuff like Sonic Adventure and beyond, the first level of Sonic Adventure for the Dreamcast is so good. It really is. You play it and you're like, wow, this is 3D Sonic, this is everything I remember. The first level is in an island setting, and you're chasing a whale, running around at sonic speed, and doing 3D loop-the-loops. It's super fun. But the problem with these games and with Sonic is, it's super fun for five minutes, and then you're like, okay, I'm done. Whereas Mario and Zelda, it's not as fun in the first five minutes, but you can play it for 50 hours and lose yourself in it.…

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