Okay, but let's go back to the hopeful years. You said you didn't have much money or much time, but you certainly seemed to make an impact.
Oh yeah. I mean, I arrived in February and we were launching in September, so I had seven months to figure out, a) what the industry was and b) what the console and software were, and then build a marketing campaign. Which we did by April. In 60 days we came up with 'It's Thinking'. We filmed a huge ad spot in Vancouver, we went ten nights and did Apocalypse, a multimillion dollar TV spot (by ad firm Foote, Cone and Belding). It was this idea that the console was actually thinking, and it was bringing 747s down, it had this Black Rain-style look. We only ran that spot once on 9.9.99 during the video music awards and it became very viral - this is obviously a long time before YouTube.

We had a tremendous 18 months. Dreamcast was on fire – we really thought that we could do it. But then we had a target from Japan that said – and I can't remember the exact figures – but we had to make N hundreds of millions of dollars by the holiday season and shift N millions of units of hardware, otherwise we just couldn't sustain the business.

So on January 31 2001 we said Sega is leaving hardware – somehow I got to make that call, not the Japanese. I had to fire a lot of people, it was not a pleasant day.

We were selling 50,000 units a day, then 60,000, then 100,000, but it was just not going to be enough to get the critical mass to take on the launch of PS2. It was a big stakes game. Sega had the option of pouring in more money and going bankrupt and they decided they wanted to live to fight another day. So we licked our wounds, ate some humble pie and went to Sony and Nintendo to ask for dev kits.

Actually, the only company that ever called was Microsoft and that became my link with the company, because of the respect I had for Robbie Bach. Xbox had launched, I was onstage with Robbie, I was the only third-party who'd go on stage with Microsoft at E3 - at that time people were saying Microsoft couldn't get it done, but I believed they could, because I believed in online. I always thought that online was going to be the key. And the line I came up with was, 'we're taking games where gaming is going'. Everybody laughed because we had Seganet going with just 50,000 people online… but I always think Dreamcast was the precursor to the next-gen consoles, because we then brought out a broadband adaptor – remember playing Quake 3 through Broadband? Only 5% of people had broadband in those days – it sounds like it was a hundred years ago, but it was 2001!