This is an edited version of a blog post that originally appeared on 09/28/2006.
“Sero, sero…
“Nothing we made, we set nothing in order,
“Neither house nor the carving,
“And what we thought had been thought for too long;
“Our opinion not opinion in evil
“But opinion borne for too long.
“We have gathered a sieve full of water.”
Ezra Pound, Cantos, Canto XXV
We’ve encountered a character in SegaGaga that might bother many long-time American Sega fans. In our present rough drafts, the character’s name is Special Task Force Director Cool. SegaGaga most likely uses him as a reference to Sega of America’s former president, Tom Kalinske.
Let’s look at some history first. At the start of the 16-bit console generation, Sega’s CEO (Nakayama) hired Kalinske to turn around the American market in Sega’s favor. Kalinske received no small order: Sega of Japan had hired him to topple Nintendo’s domination over the industry.
Kalinske reviewed Sega’s situation, went to Japan, and told the board of directors how he thought they could remove themselves from beneath Nintendo’s foot. He called for significant changes in both Sega’s product sales (such as replacing the pack-in Altered Beast for Sonic) and their advertising approach. He explained that they needed to fight Nintendo’s image; they couldn’t rely upon consumers to appreciate some intrinsic goodness in Sega’s products. The board of directors hated all of Kalinske’s ideas, but Nakayama gave his approval.
With this freedom, Kalinske built a legacy that rests in the memories of anyone who grew up as a gamer during the 16-bit console generation. I was ten when Sega released the Genesis. I remember my amazement: Sega dared to challenge the sanctity of all those gray, flip-top altars sitting in each of my friends’ bedroom. To someone young enough to invest himself emotionally in a console war, Sega and Nintendo’s rivalry carried all the moment of Achilles and Hector’s final struggle. None of us knew, then, what serious consequences could befall the videogames industry if Nintendo had prevailed. Nonetheless, we, Nintendo’s adolescent faithful, craved to see Sega dragged in disgrace behind Nintendo’s chariot.
(Sega fans praying for the integrity of our translation need not worry: I have since outgrown all loyalty to any hardware developer.)
Our reaction wasn’t due merely to our immaturity. It resulted from Kalinske’s marketing approach. He made people love the Genesis; their love necessitated our hatred. The Sega brand became something for Nintendo’s faithful numbers to spite rather than to ignore, as it had been during the 8-bit console generation.
Such was the adolescent consumer’s experience with Kalinske’s Sega of America. The business end differed significantly due to cultural tensions within Sega’s international business structure.
Material success strikes Americans as its own justification, at least in business. We hedge from an absolute approval of means-justifying ends when the players act immorally, in the events of scandals like Enron or poorly justified wars to acquire raw industrial materials. Granting these exceptions, we’re okay with someone who surprises us with his abilities.
Sega of Japan’s board of directors hardly regarded Kalinske’s success in America as virtuous. We can understand the situation if we look briefly at the structure of Japanese power relationships, and we can understand how Kalinske’s success fell within those patterns by tweaking a Western, Biblical saying.
When people act nobly in response to unjust treatment in the Bible, the text describes them as “heaping hot coals on the foreheads of their enemies.” Imagine that our hypothetical enemies knew that our actions were really holy wounds, and you have an idea how the Japanese board members perceived Kalinske’s success. Yes, he put money in their bank accounts, but he brought a lower branch of Sega greater success than the head could hope to achieve. To describe the corporate power relationships in feudal terms, Kalinske was a chief retainer who had brazenly proven himself more valorous than his lord.
The Japanese corporate world has been known to punish insolence without terminating the person’s career. A leading software designer might create an original hit series; however, if he acts as though his achievements elevate him above his co-workers, his superiors may decide to punish his attitude by confiscating the original series and sending him to develop games for a syndicated J-Pop franchise. So Sega of Japan seemingly punished Kalinske. They manipulated the company’s structure to strip him of any real authority, and they left him with all the direct power of England’s royal family. Kalinske became fed up with the whole affair, left Sega, and boosted LeapFrog, Inc., to tremendous success.
Of course, Sega began to stumble toward their present state shortly afterwards. They might not have expected him to quit, since most Japanese employees who are thus disciplined remain with the company to regain their former prestige. In effect, they razed themselves by exposing Kalinske to passive Japanese corporate discipline and driving him away. After that, they set nothing in order–the house nor the carving, their consoles nor their software. Sega’s failure speaks nothing bad about the quality of their hardware or games; rather, it demonstrates how great architectural plans can collapse when executed badly.
Tom Kalinske’s entrance into and exit from Sega might mark the most dramatic part of the company’s history. The events highlight many of the cultural attitudes that brought Sega to perdition, and many of these attitudes remain in the Japanese game industry today. SegaGaga, as a reflection upon the company’s history as well as the industry in general, addresses these events as a matter of course.
The game hasn’t seemed to address these issues in the way we might expect, though. I will make the caveat that we have not finished everything dealing with Cool, Kalinske’s in-game persona. According to everything we’ve translated so far, however, SegaGaga renders Kalinske a villain to the point that he opposes and nearly snuffs the plan intended to save Sega along with the rest of the videogames industry.
The character’s description reflects Kalinske’s legacy within the company. I’ll avoid writing spoilers and skip the circumstances of his appearance in-game, but I’ll present our rough draft of his introductory conversation with Alisa, Taro Sega, and Yayoi Haneda (the heroine).
Alisa: Meet Special Task Force Director Cool. He’s just arrived from the United States.
[ skipped dialogue to avoid spoilers ]
Cool: We’ve detected an increase in suspicious activities ever since Project SegaGaga began.
Heroine: …!
Cool: We’re currently in a state of emergency, so I’ve assumed control over Project SegaGaga from now on.
Alisa: What!? But the CEO….
Cool: My orders have come straight from the CEO himself. I’ve got the paperwork to prove it. Want to check it?
Alisa: Definitely.
Cool: I’ll fill in the details later. For now, just get back to work.
[ Cool leaves. ]
Heroine: Director Cool… who on earth was that guy?
Alisa: Sega’s shrewdest employee… the man responsible for tripling our hold on the American market. And….
Hero: Yeah?
Alisa: He’s also the man who most opposed Project SegaGaga from the start.
[ END. ]
Both Kalinske and Cool are American, and both drastically increased Sega’s hold over the American market. The game’s characters–all Japanese, of course–regard him as “shrewd,” an attitude that contrasts with the other characters’ confidence in the genius of a fun-loving wunderkind. Cool intrudes upon Project SegaGaga with the CEO’s authority, just as the Japanese executives perhaps viewed Kalinske’s presence as unfairly forced upon them by Nakayama.
Later events reveal that Cool is a total hard-ass. He prompts the hero to make a few decisions that, if made badly, can result in his immediate termination from Sega. He then forces the hero to develop a game in the dregs of Sega’s complex, gradually taking away his designers, programmers, and budget. Cool forces the hero to release the incomplete game, and he later reprimands the hero, “Yes, I gave the order to release the game, but I don’t recall giving you the order to release it with so many bugs.” All of this, of course, casts Kalinske (by association with Cool) and a generalized idea of “the American approach to game development” in a bad light.
The evidence for the reference seems solid. But what kind of commentary does this offer?
I interpret Cool’s character as a tongue-in-cheek satire of the hyperbolic reactions that Kalinske’s success provoked. While his success in Sega might have appeared inappropriate within a Japanese corporate structure, he didn’t bear the ill will toward Sega of Japan (or share the hubris) that Cool clearly does. I’d suggest, then, that Cool represents the preception of Kalinske as hubristic and inappropriately ambitious, taken to crazy anime proportions replete with magic space-headbands and deistic delusions.
Then light air, under saplings,
the blue banded lake under aether,
an oasis, the stones, the calm field,
the grass quiet,
and passing the tree of the bough
The grey stone posts,
and the stair of gray stone,
the passage clean-squared in granite:
descending,
and I through this, and into the earth,
patet terra,
entered the quiet air
the new sky,
the light as after a sunset,
and by their foundations, the heroes,
Sigismundo, and Malatesta Novello,
and founders, gazing at the mounts of their cities.
Ezra Pound, Cantos, Canto XVI
I sent a memo to Japan in 1995, saying Sega would be better off just becoming a software company–we could support Sony, and even Nintendo. They sent a reply: “We will always be in the hardware business.”
Other good resources for more on Tom Kalinske:
Tom Kalinske: American Samurai (Horowitz, Sega-16)
Tom Kalinske: Interview (Horowitz, Sega-16)