Former SEGA head talks taking on Nintendo, praises Pokémon GO

Coming from a VentureBeat interview with Former Sega chief Tom Kalinske...

VB: If you could take us back, look back a little, what do you think were some of the most important accomplishments you had at Sega?

Tom Kalinske: After being out of the industry for 20 years, I think I’ve learned an awful lot in the last few days, so thanks for inviting me. At Sega, in 1990, when I joined the company, I think the most important thing I initially did was form the right team. Some of the people were already there. We brought a lot of people in. By the way, on diversity, six of our top 14 executives were women in 1991 in the video game industry. Think about that for a second.

We had a problem, though. Nintendo had 98 percent of the market. That’s a pretty big problem. They controlled retail. They controlled third parties. Third parties and retailers were afraid that if they helped Sega, they wouldn’t get their cartridges shipped or their hardware to fill shelf space. It was a difficult issue. We had to attack the problem in a different way.

We left Nintendo with what I would call the kids’ market, the 7-15 market, and we went after teens and college-age kids. We didn’t have the money Nintendo had, so we had to be clever in our advertising, do stuff like “Nintendon’t” and “Welcome to the next level.” We made fun of Nintendo in our ads, which they really appreciated. And eventually we started gaining on them.

We also did grass roots marketing. We had a college kid on a lot of campuses who was a good gamer. We’d give him Genesis hardware and then send him software. All we wanted back was for him to walk around campus and talk about how wonderful the Genesis and Sega was.

VB: What do you think of Pokémon Go, then? If you were launching Sonic Go, how would you do that?

Kalinske: [laughs] That’s a great idea. I love Pokémon Go. John talked about it yesterday. It’s the perfect marriage of virtual reality and a great license. It’s a 20-year property that started as little collectible characters. Then it was a card game. Then it was a series of video games and television shows. All those characters — I think there’s 720 total now? Something like that. What an opportunity, to get up on your feet with your son or daughter and wander around and explore and find these things and collect them. Brag to your friends how many you’ve collected. It’s a marvelous product, a marvelous game. They haven’t even started trading yet. There’s a lot of opportunities for the future.

Needless to say — somebody yesterday mentioned it was worth $3 billion now. We at Alsop Louie would be very happy if that’s true.