EA Sports boss Peter Moore has a reputation in the industry for his hair-trigger outspokenness, but what he said to Sonic the Hedgehog creator Yuji Naka is so rude I’m not even allowed to repeat it here.
In a recent interview with U.K. men’s magazine Esquire, Moore recounted a tale from his pre-EA Sports and Xbox days when he was working for Sega. Moore was involved with the launch of the Sega Dreamcast, and as part of his duties he had assembled a focus group to try to figure out why the system was being viciously curb-stomped by Sony’s PlayStation 2. One of the questions the group was asked was, “If these brands were people, who would they be?” and Sega, as it turns out, was the “granddad with dementia who used to be cool but you couldn’t remember why.”
A harsh assessment in any light, yes, but when Moore got to Tokyo to present Japanese-dubbed tapes of his findings to Sega executives, Naka accused him of tampering with the dialog, which apparently lit Moore’s fuse. “I lost it,” he said. “I turned to the interpreter and said, ‘Tell him, ‘F*** you’.'” The interpreter refused, but Moore is confident Naka got the point. “Naka had lived in the U.S. for three years, so I knew he understood,” Moore added. “I walked out and never returned.”
There’s no doubt that Peter Moore can shovel the shit a mile a minute and sometimes he grates on people because of it, but how can you not love this? Say what you will about the man – he’s got personality.
